“The paintings look into the dissolution of boundaries. Objects bleed into one another. Bodies lose their edges. Memories soften until they are no longer distinct but still undeniably present… A nascent butterfly held in a state of perpetual emergence.”
- Molebatsi Matshana.
How do you tell form from matter or the matter from the form? Molebatsi Matshana’s paintings and photographs build a universe of potential, a cocoon of work that bleeds into and out of itself.
Moving through A Portrait of Form is a process of peering into a crystal ball to see what blooms from your subconscious. There are spaces in our thinking and in our memories where the lines are blurred. These are places of deep potential - a wellspring of discovery. Concerned with the ephemeral and transitional, Molebatsi provides a space for us to slowly and carefully uncover parts of ourselves lying just beneath the surface.
As Molebatsi writes about this exhibition: “The project imagines ephemera not as something tragic or disappearing, but as something familiar and safe. A place where forms are always in the process of becoming or un-becoming. The exhibition seeks a way of seeing that resembles half-opened eyes in bright sunlight. Shapes dissolve into one another through a kaleidoscope of light and memory. The work avoids the rigid certainty of lucidity in favour of ambiguity, where meaning is allowed to remain unresolved.”