Duo show

Gallery of the Alliance française du Cap, Cape Town, South Africa

made possible thanks to Christian Voarick

January 5 - February 23 2023

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A dialogue between the paintings of Chuma Somdaka and Patricia Fort Pizá does not seem obvious at first glance. However, in their artistic approaches, in their conceptions of Art, the two painters meet and complement each other. While providing a distinctive touch, that differs in terms of techniques and vision, both artists are witnesses of a new wave in contemporary painting. This wave is a whirlwind carried away by a dream where the oneiric and the fantasized mix with the depicted reality. A new pictoriality that nonetheless seems to make allusions to the past, the shared past, the intimate past.

Given the proliferation of digital imagery in recent years and the daily flow of these representations, the medium of painting allows for a different look at what is significant.

 

Somdaka begins by drawing pastel portraits from a bench in Company Gardens where she sleeps. She draws to sustain herself both physically and mentally. Somdaka considers that her painting practice saved her life during a period when "dark" thoughts accompanied her. Like Patricia Fort Pizá, Somdaka feels this visceral need for plastic expression. Somdaka continued her pictorial experience by learning in the Cape Town library. Today, she studies art, is exhibited and has been the subject of an award-winning documentary. Patricia Fort Pizá is an artist on the move, who travels throughout Europe, particularly in France where she has lived for many years. Her career began in film, which gives her work a special dimension: Somewhere between reality and fiction, documenting states as abstract as feelings, Patricia Fort Pizá transmits to us a world of dreams.

Both play with our perception to give us their own visual language in colors: at times dreamlike, where white and pastel colors dominate for one artist, and at other times agitated visions where the colors are saturated and black appears as the main character for the other. Between the waking dream, the peaceful dream and the nightmare, the viewer does not know where to stand.

For Somdaka, art becomes the saving element, which can serve as a therapy and regulator to get out of her difficult situation. Starting by burning a wooden stick which she then uses as a charcoal, black, the most enigmatic color, becomes her first ally. Bright colors also give rhythm to Somdaka's paintings, pastel colors to Fort Pizá's. If in Patricia Fort Pizá's paintings the figures appear as ghosts or are marked by their absence, in Chuma Somdaka's paintings, which begin with the portrait, the human figure seems central. Somdaka refers to her artistic style as freestyle and freehand, where the emotion conveyed is just as important as the subject depicted.

Somdaka's art is rooted in life and the reality of emotions, just as we find emotions in the paintings of Patricia Fort Pizá. However, her paintings are more about a forgotten dream than about reality. When the dream collides with reality, a violent confrontation can take place. Yet in this encounter, however brutal, poetry emerges as the main subject. Indeed, the more we look, the more the similarities between the two artists and their paintings emerge.

 

The most striking character in the paintings is probably color, which is also marked by its absence. Festive, bold, explicit or diluted and transparent, each artist has her own style.

Flat areas of color are superimposed, revealing motifs with a humanoid appearance. Somdaka's characters are in perpetual movement, almost agitated. Her paintings are an imprint of life, of a situation or an emotion. Those of Fort Pizá are just as phantasmagorical, but more discreet, as if erased, they testify by their traces of their oneiric presence.

For both artists, the emphasis is on the unseen and the hidden rather than on the obvious. Although representation is present, it seems to be reduced to forms that can take on different guises. They suggest that omissions in the provision of visual elements can awaken a sense of reality.

Their processes also differ in the techniques and mediums employed. Yet they both follow a tenaciously developed process. They work with uncertainty and disorientation as a means of questioning. Doubt, affect and regression emerge from a process of information and discharge on the surface of the paintings.

What we see are layers, a dense material. From time to time a fragment of representation appears, a tribal sign, a celestial body, the trace of an animal or perhaps a human. But it never unfolds into a fully defined narrative or scene. Instead, these vague indications of form float or rest quietly in a space. The atmospheres of the paintings, whether restrained, tense or fluid, thus become their primary focus. The materiality of the works thus merges with their mental content.

 

Alma Sammel

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