Baba Tjeko’s work feels lived-in, as though he inhabits the interiority of his artworks while painting, lending them lives, afterlives, strands of memory, and vignettes from childhood. What emerges is an amalgam of influences: a kind of DNA sequence that informs a brushstroke or charcoal mark, figures rendered with love, affection, and an enduring capacity for skilful execution. Every mark carries the weight of something felt before it was seen, something known before it was articulated, later given form through language. His figures arrive on the canvas already imbued with history; not the grand, public kind, but the quiet, domestic, deeply human kind. The kind that lives in the body long after the mind has let it go, ruminating in sections that cascade joy and trauma with a genteel appeal, an appellation earned through intimacy rather than declaration. In his renditions of daily African life, an array of experiences comes into view: an umbrella embroidered with the Orlando Pirates logo in one scene; a group posing in front of a taxi in another; elsewhere, a woman in a Victorian-era dress superimposed onto a township setting. History appears fragmented, contested, and site-specific.

Tseliso Monaheng

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Simon Stone’s work demands time. Time from the viewer, because these are not paintings that can usefully be taken in and processed in the seconds (or nanoseconds) we have become accustomed to give over to images in our million-pictures-a-day world of social and digital media. They demand time from the maker, too. On the screens of our phones, we flip through a multitude of images, mostly unconnected to each other, as a several-times-daily activity. Much has been made – pseudo-scientifically in my opinion – about how our brains have been “rewired” by our exposure to social media and the like. Rather, I think we have developed strategies and skills to process incoming information differently. Our brains, endlessly seeking meaning from the things we see, create linkages and connections, whether logical or absurd. The point is that we seek meaning in a world where so much seems unconnected, confusing or random. With his labour intensive, richly layered and concentrated works Simon Stone, I would argue, challenges our new-found tendency to scroll down or flip right when confronted with contrasting picture elements. By placing them together, unified by the unique intentionality of the artist, we are stopped in our tracks and our imagination is delightfully challenged. The puzzle is not the picture; rather we become the puzzle that the picture evokes.

Andrew Lamprecht