HALF ART
CHRIS THURMAN: Peeling back layers to find fugitive meaning in the past and present, the concealed and revealed
Artist Moshekwa Langa uses collage layering to convey ‘erasure of memory over time’ in powerful, thought-provoking Fugitive exhibition
A friend of mine is a Jesuit priest. This means he went through a rigorous 15-year training period, much of which entailed academic study of one kind or another. Still, none of his various degrees was in art history, so when I suggested we visit Moshekwa Langa’s exhibition Fugitive (now coming to the end of its two-month stint at Stevenson Johannesburg), he professed general ignorance on the visual arts and uncertainty about his ability to discern the "meaning" of the work. You could have fooled me. As we stepped inside the gallery, he launched into a formalist analysis of Langa’s collages that would have made any art critic proud. It was not easy going; Langa veers from abstraction to heavy symbolism. At times he appears more interested in the textures and colours of his mixed media, and, in particular, with the effect of scoring verticals and diagonals across canvas with strips of masking tape. At other times, he reproduces grainy black-and-white photographs of people and objects ...
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