In a solo exhibition of new drawings, prints and paintings at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, Sam Nhlengethwa pays homage to trumpeter and composer Miles Davis and celebrates the recent 50th anniversary of his groundbreaking album Kind of Blue. The record, which is universally known as one of the most influential and best-selling jazz albums of all time, has been as significant in South Africa as it has been everywhere else.

Described by many musicians and music-lovers as a bible – “something everybody owns” – Kind of Blue could be found in the record collections of everyone Nhlengethwa knew growing up. “When I was a youngster,” the artist reflects, “on Sundays when people were relaxing, from street to street people would sit with a portable vinyl player listening to Miles Davis.”

And, he says “unlike with the other vinyls where we picked tracks, Kind of Blue was played repeatedly from the first track, ‘So What?’ to its last track ‘Flamenco Sketches’”. With its experimental modal sketches, the album’s initial and ultimately enduring success came as a surprise to Davis and his sextet, which consisted of pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, drummer Jimmy Cobb, bassist Paul Chambers, and saxophonists John Coltrane and Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. “Evans is quoted as saying when they did the album, they had no idea it would become so important,” explains Nhlengethwa. “As a painter, I drew a parallel to that – when I make a new painting I never know how important it will be.”

Much of the musicians’ astonishment at their own success lay in the album’s commercially precarious experimentation. While Davis’s albums Milestones (1958) and 1958 Miles (1958) featured modal elements, Kind of Blue was based entirely on modality, marking a major departure from his previous albums and their highly popular hard bop style. Influenced by pianist George Russell, Davis provided each performer with a set of scales rather than a complete score, which determined the framework of their improvisation and technique. This musical process, with its focus on scales and modes, embodied what Davis famously called “a return to melody”. Recorded in only two short sessions in 1959, Davis and his sextet reached a new level of ingenuity through an eagerness to relinquish popular approaches in the quest for something new and compelling.

The universal nature of the album, its maverick edge and the significance of its 50th
anniversary prompted Nhlengethwa to devote his entire upcoming solo show to Kind of Blue; the exhibition adopting the album’s title as its namesake. Featuring a series of etchings and lithographs produced at Mark Attwood’s Artists’ Press studio in White River as well as mixed media collage drawings and paintings all the size of vinyl record covers; Nhlengethwa’s new works are stark, mostly monochromatic and affectingly vivid, echoing the emotion of Davis’s melody. Black and white rendered silhouette figures recall another era, an age when taking risks was central to cultural development. The images are – in a smooth yet sketchy technique that takes Nhlengethwa’s characteristic style to new heights – a homage to music that is urbane and transcendent, minimal yet multifaceted and ultimately pioneering.

The show will consist of over 30 mainly small scale works, as Nhlengethwa wants “the show to breathe, I don’t want it to be too cluttered”. The gallery space will, however, be infused with the modal sketches of Kind of Blue, as the album will be played on a loop for the duration of the show. This pensive, musing show will be the last of Nhlengethwa’s to focus on the theme of jazz, something he has dealt with for decades. Presenting a distinctive series, which is at times sombre and at times celebratory, Nhlengethwa’s Kind of Blue maintains a sophisticated character suited to the thematic closure he is pursuing.

Nhlengethwa was born in the mining community of Payneville in Springs in 1955 and grew up in Ratanda location in Heidelberg, east of Johannesburg. He completed a two-year Fine Art Diploma at the Rorkes Drift Art Centre in the late 1970s. While he exhibited extensively both locally and abroad throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Nhlengethwa’s travelling solo show South Africa, Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in 1993 established him at the vanguard of critical consciousness in South Africa and he went on to win the Standard Bank Young Artist Award in 1994. His work has been included in key exhibitions such as Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and major publications such as Phaidon’s.

The 20th Century Art Book. He has had several solo shows in South Africa and abroad and has been a resident of the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios in Newtown, Johannesburg since the 1990s where, he says, “a week never passes without me listening to Kind of Blue”.

Madagascan-born and Paris-based artist Joël Andrianomearisoa will present his first
solo exhibition in South Africa – A Perfect Kind of Love – at the Goodman Gallery
Project Space at Arts on Main. The Goodman Gallery will also present a performance
by Andrianomearisoa at SA Fashion Week’s Winter 2011 Designer Collections show,
which takes place at Arts on Main in October.
A versatile artist of consummate talent, Andrianomearisoa qualified as an architect
at the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. Initially drawn to the multifaceted nature
of architectural practice, Andrianomearisoa became increasingly engaged with
other modes of cultural production, pursuing a career as a couturier before shifting
his practice to the visual arts. He consequentially works across various media,
avoiding categorisation and incorporating performance, video and large-scale
installation in his work.
A Perfect Kind of Love continues Andrianomearisoa’s ongoing exploration of
eroticism and desire, his negotiations with a love of a darker kind. Love is rarely
perfect, and perfection is not always lovable, and Andrianomearisoa’s engagement
with this contradiction is what forms the raw material of the show. How does one
speak of love, or understand love in the age of reason, or amidst the cynicism of this
current moment? Romantic love is never just a private declaration or an emotional
contract between two individuals – it is a political battlefield. Sexual bodies engaging
in acts of love are at times also sites of violence, disease, moral judgment and
commodification, and are subjected to legislation, marginalisation and
criminalisation.
It is from within this context that Andrianomearisoa longingly declares Darling you can
make my dreams come true if you say you love me too, an installation consisting of
150 small wall-mounted mirrors – each a reflective dream, a yearning for the
impossible, or a plea for this world to fade and for something more beautiful and
utopian to emerge. Veering from expressions of primal, animalistic lust to whispers of
restraint and bondage, Andrianomearisoa’s installations chart an intense emotional
journey that is both autobiographically specific and universally symbolic. The work
speaks of secret, private intimacies while acknowledging other, more open and
public expressions of love and sexuality.
For Andrianomearisoa the body itself is a central aspect to a negotiation of space
and ideas within his work. The body becomes fundamental to the artist’s
deconstructivist tendencies, alluding to volatility and contained chaos. It is through
performance that Andrianomearisoa expresses this aspect of his creative intent most
poignantly. He will in this light be presenting Cut Cute at SA Fashion Week, a
performance involving several participants who will be subject to a layering of various
textiles and materials. The final “cut” of their outfits will be result of a dramatic
creative process that has been openly disclosed to the audience, offering what art
critic Virginie Andriamirado refers to as “infinite propositions”. “To build or deconstruct,
to dress or undress, to fill or empty, to wrinkle or fold, to light up or turn off-
Andrianomearisoa is situated between these opposing forces that, according to him,
combine rather than conflict. In these paradoxical connections, the works offer
infinite propostions,” states Andriamirado.
Andrianomearisoa’s work not only deconstructs modernist ideals such as “purity of
form,” and “truth to materials”, but also recalls French curator and theorist Nicolas
Bourriaud’s notion of relational aesthetics. “I like art that allows its audience to exist in
the space opened up by it,” explains Bourriaud. “For me, art is a space of images,
objects, and human beings. Relational aesthetics is a way of considering the
productive existence of the viewer of art, the space of participation that art can
offer.” Andrianomearisoa employs this approach in his use of the body as one of the
many materials that he integrates and layers within his work, ultimately questioning
the way in which our bodies are used and manipulated in a broader context. Cut
Cute will take place on Fox street outside Arts on Main on 2 October 2010 and will act
as both a collaboration with another creative industry – fashion – as well as an
alternative platform for Andrianomearisoa’s use of the body and textiles within
performance.
Andrianomearisoa was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, in 1977. He left
Madagascar for Paris when he was 19 in order to further his studies at the Ecole
Spéciale d’Architecture. He has participated in a number of major group exhibitions,
including Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, and the 2010 Sinopale Biennale in
Sinop, Turkey. His work most recently featured on In Context, hosted by Goodman
Gallery at Arts on Main and other venues in Johannesburg. He lives and works
between Antananarivo and Paris.