STEVENSON presents Tomorrow is Another Day, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Neo Matloga and Bele bele tšieng, a solo exhibition of drawings by Moshekwa Langa.
Firstly on what’s on at STEVENSON is Neo Matloga with Tomorrow is Another Day. For his first exhibition in Johannesburg since 2020, Neo Matloga presents a tableau of figures in quiet moments witnessed in moments of daily life between Johannesburg and Mamaila village, Limpopo, South Africa where he grew up. The artist describes his paintings as ‘psychological landscapes’ where the range of emotions comprising the everyday are captured on a spectrum, ranging from love to exasperation and reverence. Where Matloga’s first exhibition, Back of the Moon, referenced scenes from local soap operas, plays and family albums, Tomorrow is Another Day relinquishes theatricality, emphasising stillness and familiarity alongside the equal measures of presence and dignity.
Working across painting, collage and monotype printmaking, Matloga is drawn to the varied gestural markings these materials produce. He sees the ink, charcoal and fast-drying paints as implements which demand presence and urgency, adding a temporal stake to his practice. In this exhibition, urgency mirrors the rhythm of photography: the single frame, the fleeting breath. But where photography captures a moment, painting chases it and Matloga uses painting as if the camera were embedded in the pulse of his hand.
Through scale, Matloga’s figures impose upon the viewer. Their pointed gaze, which extends outside the frame, dispels any assumed passivity of the individual depicted, who is looked at but rarely looks back. The splintering of the viewer’s perspective is further affected by Matloga’s collaged approach, where the mediums elucidate different gestures and tones. His depiction of hands, collaged onto the canvas using monotype prints, draws the viewer’s attention to the specificity of the body language in each scene. Across these figures, who emerge from all works of life, Matloga reflects on the politicisation of the hands as an allegory for labour, comfort and access.
Matloga recounts the storytelling he grew up with in Mamaila, which interwove gesture, myth and ritual, as key to his overall practice. His paintings seek a balance between this mode of sharing and moments experienced in both intimate and public settings. The slippages in materiality and play with proportions in these works reflect this interweaving of the real and abstract, leading to a new depiction of the mundane, guided by feeling.
Tomorrow is Another Day is about quiet resilience found in small rituals such as in the decision to show up again even when no one is watching. These are portraits of everyday courage as well as stories that live beneath the surface which hold the quiet but powerful belief that tomorrow still holds something for us. This exhibition opened on the 30th of August and will run until the 25th of October 2025 at STEVENSON, Johannesburg.
Secondly on what’s on at STEVENSON is Bele bele tšieng, a solo exhibition of drawings by Moshekwa Langa.
The title of this selection of drawings is drawn from a Setswana idiom translating as ‘our maize is being swarmed by locusts’, a phrase used to explain the oscillations of bounty and ruin and, more simply, how the good can occasion its opposite.
Langa’s mixed-media drawings, combing watercolour, ballpoint pen, graphite and pastel, were begun in 2019 and revisited in 2021 during moments of pause afforded by the pandemic lockdowns. Having originally been exhibited in the artist’s home – as part of a digital presentation – when travel was nigh impossible, the works are now shared with the public for the first time.
Across these works on paper, the artist employs radiant hues, solar motifs and fragments of text which appear to name his ambiguous figures, marking a return to narrative after years of focusing on abstract forms. In Bele bele tšieng, Langa offers a visual notebook of people and places longed for, foregrounding a warmth of feeling only generated by the gifts of absence. This exhibition opened on the 23rd of August and will run until the 11th of October at STEVENSON, Cape Town.
