It was a Monday morning, and I had the feeling the brave souls soldiering up and down Long Street in Cape Town were suffering through a collective hangover: not so much from weekend boozing as from, well, 2026 thus far. Or was I merely projecting my own ennui and anxiety about the global State of Things?
No doubt my mood — the sense of walking through a scene of after-effects, detritus and leftovers — was compounded by the conclusion, the previous day, of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair. Sprinkled across the city bowl and surrounds, I knew, were artists, collectors and gallerists. But they had spent their conversational or art-consuming energy and were nowhere to be seen.
Fortunately, Association for Visual Arts (AVA) director Olga Speakes is no ordinary mortal. Once I had made my way to the AVA Gallery, I found the doors standing open and brisk business being conducted as usual. I was there to see Making Space, an exhibition by the four artists selected for the 2025 Nando’s Creative Exchange: Mduduzi Twala, Fleur de Bondt, Sello Letswalo and Debbie Field.
If the purposes of art include providing solace one moment and discomfiting us the next, instructing and challenging, delighting and provoking in equal measure, then the side-by-side curation of works by this quartet certainly achieves that paradoxical outcome.
De Bondt describes her acrylic and oil paintings as “a confrontation with the world’s wounds, and a reminder that even despair can become visual resistance”. It is primarily “environmental loss” that concerns De Bondt, and her work is presented under the rubric Elegy for the Plenty, driven by an almost apocalyptic imagination of ecosystemic collapse. Paintings such as Inferno and the monoprints Lamentations Over Worlds Either Vanishing or Lost Entirely convey this in devastating expressionist landscapes, while Chaos Imploding on Itself gestures towards urban crises.
There is an “end times” atmosphere, too, in the purple-yellow-pink hues of Twala’s Inkumbulo (memory or remembering in isiZulu) and other paintings in this series. Or, more accurately, the people in these images seem “out of their time” — simultaneously from the past and suspended in a hazy future that combines the stark lines of industrial infrastructure with restorative natural elements. Either way, something is being mourned, as suggested by the title, Zinyembezi zami (my tears).
In another series of paintings, Twala depicts recognisable historical figures including Nina Simone and James Baldwin along with archetypal characters: young men and old, bound by the cycle of leaving, working, ageing, returning. Ungakhohlwa (don’t forget) insists one title. Another affirms the importance of Imvelaphi (origin, birthplace, heritage). Perhaps it is recalling where you come from that brings comfort and confidence in a world of struggle and uncertainty.
Letswalo’s mixed media pieces also invoke shared material histories and cultural reference points, albeit in a hip and playful fashion. Painting on corrugated metal, Letswalo conjures pantsula styling, kids playing township games and huts in a rural homestead. Yet he also resists the cliché rendering of black life in South Africa through parodic disjunction: therianthropes (figures with cows’ heads on human bodies) insert themselves like photobombers into divergent scenes, including the colourful beach huts on the False Bay coast, while Badimo (the gods) brings numerous spiritual traditions together.
Field’s abstract acrylics take us away from the dense allusiveness of this semiotic universe into a different mode. The “spaces” created by her paintings shift both the visual language of the exhibition and its register; we are no longer in the paradigm of past and future, of who and why, of here and there. Instead, we encounter only colour, light, shape — a kind of eternal present, which is the moment of looking. This, too, brings comfort. It is a form of escape from history, an insistence on the now of sense data, of emotions that are stirred up and then dissipate.
While abstraction has its beauty, I can’t dwell in it too long. Here I admit to a philosophical and temperamental shortcoming: I’m always thinking about the unknown that lies ahead, like the alluring, threatening, promising light coming around the corner in De Bondt’s evocative work The Conversation.
- ‘Making Space’ is at the AVA Gallery (35 Church Street, Cape Town) until March 5.
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