Banele Khoza

How are you doing?

10 june — 8 August, 2023

 BKhz, Johannesburg, ZA

Dear Diary or Friend

by Ayodeji Rotinwa

Usually, the viewer knows little of the fellowship between a painter and their sitter. Other than the outcome: the portrait they can now view in a home, a gallery, museum or wherever else the painter has deemed appropriate. Sure, there may be some accompanying story: the sitter is a friend, a lover, or a stranger deemed interesting (or available) enough to be immortalized in oil, film, acrylic, stone or wood. There’s often little detail. 

In his current exhibition, Banele Khoza makes the process a little more transparent. Here, we learn the sitters are indeed friends, or in one case, hopefully, a lover, one day. But the act of being painted, this relationship goes beyond what is in service to the artist and his canvas. We learn that these sessions are guided by inquiries into wellbeing. That the sitters come not just to be immortalized, but to share their inner thoughts with the artist, to fellowship in feeling, to make each other’s burdens of the day… a little lighter. 

How are you doing? 

It can be the most innocuous and yet empty question, often asked as a formality, the asking party not necessarily listening for or seeking to act - even if invited - on a response. But, seemingly, not here. 

In We are good (2023) - the title perhaps a response to Khoza’s question - we see two sitters (friends, lovers?) dressed identically. One sits on what appears to be a chair, and the other standing very close beside him. Their bodies touch: an arm leans into a thigh, a hand rests on the other’s shoulder, traveling down slightly to the chest. Their expressions are inscrutable, ordinary. But there is unmistakable tenderness here. Fleeting, if you don’t stare long enough but there. The sitters - perhaps by Khoza’s bidding, as an answer to the question or unwittingly, wear their feelings for his eye. In We find rest in each other (2023) the sitter faces us with his eyes closed. Hands crossed resting on the other, one holding a camera. Whether imagining, lost in thought, caught in a daydream or nap, or literally resting, we do not know. But he appears far from us. He has gone away. And yet he is still present. I saw this painting and quite literally, exhaled.

This body of work is a small narrative departure for Khoza whose work for the last few years have been unapologetically sentimental, but decidedly personal. What he reveals on the canvas are usually his alone: ruminations on unrequited love, self-actualization and worth, loneliness, anxiety, ambition, abandonment, as seen in the solo exhibition Seeking Love (2018-2019) and 27 (2021) Now we see - and are clearly told - that other people are feeling too. Not to say the exhibition is still not personal or autobiographical in parts. 

How are you doing? is also a self-directed question for Khoza. Answers to which he has been collected in hard-backed, bendy spine journals or diaries for the last fifteen years. The diary after all is a trusted accomplice, a non-judgmental friend, and reliable listener. So the exhibition are his diaries made manifest, literally and figuratively. It is ongoing internal emotions transposed onto the canvas. In some cases, it is literal lines of texts from the diaries included.

“My father never taught me anything except … that I have only myself in this world, not even him. My father was there but not there.”

Across the exhibition, we see Khoza’s fascination with flowers. 

In his life, he has made it a tradition to buy himself some - and he says observing the life cycle of cut flowers has taught him that “life can pass you by, if you don’t pay attention to the now” In Wait for your equal (2023) we see flowers - possible coneflowers or marigolds - in what may be a vase hidden from view. We  are informed that these might be flowers in a home, or even a bathroom specifically, by the presence of two toothbrushes. The flowers droop downwards but remain vibrant still. Khoza’s brushstrokes are thick and the treatment of the flowers feels romantic. But is something missing? 

“I want love but also I am afraid of it.. I sabotage anything that feels like love, I cut it in half while it's on its way.”

In Love is on the way (2023), this time a lithograph we see lilac flowers, depicted again in a homestead. A cup filled with two spoons and a fork behind the vase. A bunch of plantains beside it. And a note: “Love is on the way” This one - knowing Khoza’s style now - feels like a promise to himself, a home scene created to manifest, to say that every good thing will come. 

“To all the boys I’ve broken, my apologies. To all the boys that broke me, thank you.”

Over the last two years Khoza has confronted a pair of different, but stark emotional upheavals: the loss of his father, and the end of a long-term crush relationship. He has not had time to grieve either. His father, it seemed he has a difficult relationship with. His crush was a friendship of longing that went on for nearly a decade, with hopes that it would become something that never came. Mourning is not so much addressed in the exhibition but the feelings those periods bore are made bare. 

In acrylic, watercolor, lithographs or text, Khoza remains - almost definitely - vulnerable. It is both a narrative and literal mission. In his selections of browns, bronzes, azures, green, orange, black, white and a deft use of space, his work feels both tender and stark. He is able to hold and interpret heavy feelings into paintings that carry the weight gracefully - and do not overpower the canvas or the viewer. Of course, yes, we all go through grief, loss, lack, love - but we often do not want to be brow beaten or reminded harshly of these things in ourselves or others. Rather, we may want to gently share.

Khoza realizes this balance beautifully. 

“Self love is indulging in your own generosity. Self love is treating yourself to your favorite tea.”

For many this may seem too much, still. Khoza reports that a collector once told him, “your work is too emotional”. An accusation certainly. And an understandable if misplaced review, in a world where people may see a certain degree of vulnerability as a lack of control, or even weakness. The collector could have also easily said: your work is too honest. The comment reminded me of The Glass Essay, a poem by Anna Carson, where the writer, who had recently been abandoned by her lover, goes to visit her mom and childhood, which appears to have been difficult. 

In it, she recalls,

You remember too much,

my mother said to me recently.

Why hold onto all that? And I said,

Where can I put it down?

Khoza certainly remembers “too much”. And holds on. And thankfully, puts it down.