Black and White Paradise

Vela Projects is proud to present Khanyi Mawhayi’s solo exhibition, Black and White Paradise, as the gallery’s inaugural showcase. The title, Black and White Paradise, comes from the artist’s desire for simplicity—to live in a ‘black and white’ world. Accordingly, this body of work sees Mawhayi experiment for the first time with black and white lines of woolen thread. These are coupled with striking bands of colour made with contours of oil stick, another exciting departure for the artist.

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Mawhayi previously worked with soft pastels on black backgrounds to subdue the vibrant colours of Tsonga xibelani skirts, resulting in a series of paintings that were at once abstract and figurative.

By capturing the movement of the dancer’s hips in chords of a variety of pasel colours including turquoise, lilac and mint, Mawhayi sought an intimacy with the Tsonga heritage from which, growing up in an urban environment, she felt somewhat estranged.

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While the works in Black and White Paradise utilise the same visual cues and thematic concerns, their use of colour is bold. Their scale is daring. Their marks are assured. Their hues hum with the grace of pure colour, in much the same way that one of Mawhayi’s inspirations, Howard Hodgkin, used colour not to inform the eye, but to enliven it.

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Hodgkin painted from memory, relying on colour to convey a particular event or sensation. Mawhayi, for her part, uses circular and rippling gestures to create forms that recall personal memories: a burst of sun, a petal in bloom, a rainbow, ribbons in yellow and green. These colours are then contrasted with alternating blocks of black and white, resulting in an effect that is almost musical: the monochrome bars convey a bassline, while the undulating oils offer an accompanying melody. Even the words that Mawhayi uses to describe her work—soft, safe, sentimental—mimic the tonality of song.

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One painting, Because I know It’s All For You, is borrowed from a lyric from a love song by London Grammar. Other titles such as The Lovers, or We Are Held sound like love songs too. At times, it could be said that the works—in the sensual contrast between straight lines of soft wool and waves of creamy pigment are erotic. Here, the influence of another inspiration, Chris Ofili—and his body of work called The Seven Deadly Sins—can be identified. Both artists are fascinated by an erotics that is conveyed not by figures but by auras. In Because I Know Its All for You, for example, the convergence of thickly-coated bars of orange and gold, thin, chalky yellow lines and the matte black background produces a vibrational effect. It is as if all of the visual elements that make up the composition of the painting are humming together.

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The artist remarks, “territories of abstraction allow for more play, more opacity… more possibilities.” Although she is quick to admit that, for her, the works are not abstract—the xibelani works depicted skirts, for example, while a more recent body of work, Midas Touch, saw the artist paint one gold sticker every day for one hundred days – she hopes that her sometimes ambiguous forms allow space for the viewer to become “comfortable with complexity.” These soft threads, these playful marks, these vibrant colours—each is a note; together, they form a complex, a chord. Like any good love song, they find depth in simplicity.