Moshekwa Langa: A painter's muse

Moshekwa Langa's installation Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) …

“Don’t be so nervous,” remarks Moshekwa Langa. We have been chatting for close on two hours, I’m late for another appointment, but here I am, still hoping for an insight into a portrait of Langa by his long-time friend, Marlene Dumas.

“Do you see a shrink?” he continues, pointing to my knotted fingers.

“No.”

“Better you don’t. That is very unhealthy. I have never seen one.”

We are seated in an empty bar at his Cape Town hotel. In a chronology defying narration of his professional biography, Langa recalls his first encounter with Candice Breitz in mid-1990s Yeoville, a 2007 visit to Venice with Linda Givon, a wild night out in Germany in 1997 with Dumas, also his first meeting with the expatriate painter two years before.

It happened shortly after his explosion onto the art scene in 1995, Langa on an artist residency at the Thami Mnyele Studios in Amsterdam. Dumas, an active member of the studio’s board, visited one day.

“Someone said I should meet that girl,” says Langa.

The pair traded polite introductory greetings. Later, while walking home, he bumped into Dumas again and struck up a more casual conversation.

“We exchanged addresses – I was living in Yeoville at the time – and she and I started writing letters to each other. She sent me stuff. She writes very nicely, you know, sweet nothings.”
The correspondence, which is ongoing, continued even when Langa was in Amsterdam again, in 1997, for a stint at the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten.

“We didn’t really have a connection because I was doing my stuff and she was doing hers. We would write each other postcards across town. And that, actually, is still how we really communicate.”

On a day three years ago, Dumas finished a large portrait she had been working on. When she presented it to Langa, he replied that the painting was too big for his home in Amsterdam. So Dumas did the next best thing: she promptly despatched his likeness on a world tour instead.
Exhibited locally on Dumas’ travelling retrospective Intimate Relations (2007-8), Langa’s portrait is now travelling across the United States on another Dumas retrospective, cheerfully titled Measuring Your Own Grave (2008-9).

Rendered in dark hues and perfunctory brushstrokes, Langa’s portrait includes a marked purple blemish on his brow and right cheek, also a smattering of bright blue around his nose and mouth. The outcome is an arresting study of a mercurial individual: Langa.

Born Moshekwa Mokwena Aron [sic] Langa in Bakenberg, Mpumalanga, in 1975, Langa is the only South African artist who made the official selection for this year’s Venice Biennale. Two years ago it was Dumas.

Fans of Langa’s shape-shifting work, which demonstrates a remarkable fluency across a range of media, might be disappointed to learn that he will be restaging an old work. Originally shown in Cape Town in 1997 as part of the second Johannesburg Biennale, his quirkily titled Temporal Distance (with a criminal intent) you will find us in the best places… is a mixed-media installation comprising bottles and spools connected by a vast weave of thread, interspersed with toy cars and plastic animals.

Like his photographs, video work, drawings and paintings, the installation forms part of an evolving body of work that collectively reads as a sort of visual biography, not just singularly of the artist but of his birth country too.

I ask Langa how many times he sat for Dumas to enable her to make the now famous portrait of him. (The painting has appeared on the cover of two art magazines.) He didn’t, he responds. The portrait was created entirely from a photograph.

The back-story to the making of this photograph offers a concise insight into Langa’s life, which since his debut exhibition at Newtown’s now defunct Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery in 1995 has involved ceaseless travel, constant exhibiting and partying.

A couple of years ago Langa was in Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean Sea, for an exhibition. While out socialising one evening he struck up a conversation with another visiting artist, a woman who had caught the eye of a couple of locals, resulting in a late-night shouting match involving Langa.

The next morning, hung-over and glum, he had his picture taken by artist Marlon
Griffith. Langa promptly used the photograph for a “wanted poster” he created as his contribution to the Martinique art event. When he returned to Amsterdam, he gave Dumas a copy. Inadvertently the elusive Langa presented Dumas with an unwavering and always present sitter for her painting.

(This article originally appeared in the June 2009 edition of the Business Day art supplement.)