Seeking Love

Text by Sihle Motsa

Banele Khoza and I are friends. We spend many an hour sitting on the green leather couch in the BKhz Gallery in Braamfontein. Even though our friendship is new, we discuss everything. We tentatively navigate our way through our backgrounds, family life, our apprehension and yearning for home and the details of our fragile love-lives. 

My narratives are always fleeting and incoherent. I nonchalantly offer snippets of my romantic escapades, the lovers who tickle my fancy for only so long, and the inevitable resolve to dissolve whatever relation there was or was going to be. We theorise about this tendency of mine to cut things off before giving them a chance to blossom or wilt. Often my reserved manner, my deep appreciation for solitude, “my walls” as Banele calls them are what deter me from making any commitments by way of romantic love. Banele’s accounts of his run-ins with love on the whole are different from mine. They always highlight Banele’s patience, his understanding and dedication to love. His approach to romance is always the same. His interactions with his love interests all bear the compassion, generosity and understanding his artistry embodies. He listens, communicates eloquently and without fear, somehow to no avail. 

Besides our couch sessions, where we gossip like pre-pubescent school girls, Banele finds an outlet for expression in his art. The top floor of the gallery space is littered with articulations of his quest for love. 

Many of these art works are for ‘Seeking Love’ the travelling show that kicks off at the Absa gallery in March. About the exhibition ‘Seeking Love’ he confides that this body work, more so than the others is inspired by his pre-occupation with love.

The most endearing works are large scale portraits which feature, a previous love interest whilst others who represent the possibility of a romantic intimacy, based on an ideal crafted carefully in his mind. These works oscillate between a darkness and tenderness that betrays the complexity that lies within. 

In Buseko, the model cum muse reclines slightly, whilst his distorted features glare at the us from under the brim of a bottle green hat. Of this tendency to distort, Banele reveals that the blurred images represent the romanticized versions which render a distorted view of the individual. It is a concession on his part. A realisation that the people we love, or want to love are often more than the image rendered by our starry-eyed vision. The hues, that make up the backdrop of the central figure serve as testament to this. The vibrant colours that burst from the canvas and drip from the figures capture the essence, the intangible virtues of the would-be lovers. 

The work Fragile, is self-explanatory. With a sequence of blues plastered against the canvas and the word fragile etched by finger across the sea of blues it is an ode to the daunting tasking of loving someone, the threat of having one’s love unrequited, the vulnerabilities that are tethered to the act of loving.   

I thought I had met my soulmate draws us towards the precarity of love in the twenty-first century. It draws us to the unpredictability of millennial love. A journal entry fashioned on a background of pink blots of acrylic, the work is revelatory in a way that only one at peace with the vagaries of romances could create. The angst offered by way of prose is softened by the accompanying palette but the gravity of the words “it is day three, I still have not heard from him, it is a missing persons case at this point” hit home. Many of us have been here, thinking the same thoughts after being subjected to an unexplained absence from a love interest. Very few of us speak so candidly of these moments, were we are left alone, confused, dejected. Even fewer seek the solace of artistry, few of us turn our misery and confusion in works of art. 

Interestingly enough this work is also an articulation of the ways in which his quest for love has been answered. Through the establishing of the Gallery Banele has come to understand the love of community. He mentions that what began as a search for a romantic love, a desperate quest for “the one” has been appeased by the love and appreciation he has received from the bourgeoning art community.