One thing is clear about Mbongeni Buthelezi — he’s no Ozymandias. In a larger-than-lifesize self-portrait at the exit of the Pretoria Art Museum, Buthelezi presents himself in a guise quite unlike that of the antique King Ozymandias, whose shattered stone visage, in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s classic poem, lies half sunk in the desert sand with a “wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command”.
Buthelezi’s full-frontal self-portrait has an enquiring gaze, as if sincerely inviting an appraisal — one doesn’t feel distanced from it. The image hails departing viewers with a statement: “Look at my work, imizwi yam‘ [my feelings]!” — the title of his first touring solo exhibition.
Buthelezi is not a painter or a collagist — and the word “assemblage” isn’t accurate to describe his image- or art-making either. Perhaps he can be correctly termed a visual constructionist.
He has created a new way of fashioning images — out of bits of coloured plastics. He burns and melts them with a heat gun on to a thicker and harder surface made of sheets of roof-lining plastic. His colours derive from industrially produced plastic materials that include branded beer labels, softdrink cans, smaller bottles and even plastic fashion-brand bags.
His palette is the waste and the detritus of our consumer culture: he “paints” with the by-products of an industrial process created to serve the sweet tooth of the moneyed in modern society. By collecting and reusing waste material destined for recycling he opens up ways of thinking about green-friendly high-art objects.
Buthelezi is considered and technical to the point of being almost scientific about his craft. He served an internship with the Plastic Federation of South Africa and says that he’s “very grateful” for the time spent there during 1993 and 1994.
He has an intimate understanding of the behaviour of each piece of plastic that he melts and manipulates into shape — and so can fully control the material he works with. He says he has developed “18 different techniques” for approaching the “painting” process. But you’d have to see him do it “to understand the technique, otherwise you’ll think I’m talking nonsense”, he says.
Four separately titled series comprise the exhibition. One of these consists of the sepia-coloured works that make up Winter in Kliptown, which came out of his fascination with the architecture of that township. He loathes how the “beautiful buildings are disappearing”. So he elected to capture them in his work.
Buthelezi is also captivated by Kliptown’s atmosphere, saying that he wanted to “capture its feeling of rust and dust”. The now-dilapidated neighbourhood is the place where the Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955.
About the Childhood series, Buthelezi says he was reflecting on his own childhood experiences. He says he had to “work hard as a child” — by age 11 he had already started helping his father at his brick-manufacturing business.
The effects of that hard work affect him to this day, he says, and he remembers it whenever he gets backaches. But he credits his laborious upbringing for his work ethic. “I guess I benefited from those days in a way, because my creative work is also labour-intensive and I can cope easily with it,” he says.
The Jazzing It Up series is a set of smaller portraits that look at the expressive faces of musicians at work. Buthelezi says he noticed how without those facial expressions sometimes the performed “message of the music would be lost”. These portraits are coloured, unlike the smaller black-and-white series of introspective self-portraits that share the exhibition’s title, Imizwi Yam‘.
As a spectacle the exhibition reflects an artist who dares to give us back our decay — filtered through his humanity — in exchange for our gaze.
Mbongeni Buthelezi’s Imizwi Yam’ shows at the Pretoria Art Museum until August 16