Mmangaliso Nzuza was born in 1998 in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, now lives and works in Cape Town. Returning to South Africa in 2022 after studying at the University of Edinburgh, Nzuza set up a makeshift studio in his garage and began creating representational works in pencil and charcoal. He soon turned to oil painting where he committed to studying the language of the medium. Inventing and refining his own style meant conveying more feeling, movement and vulnerability in his subjects. Nzuza has arrived at an aesthetic sensibility that is both painterly and restrained, recalling the bold fragmentation of the early 20th-century Cubist painters.
Nzuza’s earlier works have placed his subjects in domestic spaces but through An Open Letter the artist transports his subjects outdoors. In shedding the confinement of interior scenes, Nzuza’s figures expand beyond the politics of home to find ease, pleasure, hope and ritual in the wilds. Nzuza’s sensuous oil paintings depict angular, figurative compositions imbued with both the familiar and imagined. Drawing on allegory, atmospheric colour and gestural mark-making, An Open Letter explores themes of community, subjectivity and metaphoric harvest. Melding personal memory with fictive spaces and subjects, Nzuza’s immense canvases build cinematic moments of narrative ambiguity. Multiple bodies exist in each frame, arranged in configurations that suggest community, but evoke a sense of self-containment.
An Open Letter is rich in allegorical referencing. Bodies of water become thematic sites of cleansing and sacrament. Fruit reads as a recurring metaphoric invocation of abundance, earthly pleasures, patience and generative love. The human figure acts as a springboard for Nzuza’s dedication to experiments in composition. Drawn without particularity from a learned muscle memory, his bodies contort into exploratory proportions and configurations. His subjects are weighted, exuding solidity and a sculptural presence that seem to declare “We are here”. Whether in repose, reclining in some imagined field of green, or in action, plucking ripening fruit from the earth, these figures lay proud claim to space. They are rooted, uninhibited and so evidently a part of the greater whole; as stoic and divine as a tree, a lake, the sky itself.
Nzuza plays with the fractional rendering of landscapes and pastoral scenes, working lush fragments of impasto paint into patchwork planes of movement and light. While some paintings present layers of receding rolling hills or fields of tall, undulating grass, other canvases offer more abstract non-spaces, liminal backdrops of soothing colour. Angular black lines act as compositional disruptions, lending some perspectives a dream-like quality while toying with the eye’s perspective of the work’s spatial logic. These negative spaces offer a plurality of readings, holding ample, prompting possibilities for the gazing eye. In resisting specificity of both place and subject, An Open Letter relies on exploratory form, sensory texturality and colour to create portals into universal emotional experiences. An Open Letter opens on the 29th of August and will run until the 31st of October 2024 at Southern Guild Cape Town, running concurrently with Invisible Hand by Zimbabwean ceramist Xanthe Somers and In the Present Tense by Jozua Gerrard.
