Mustafa Maluka at the Michael Stevenson Contemporary
By Kim Gurney
Mustafa Maluka's canvases have come a long way since we first spoke last year on his return to Cape Town. Then, Maluka was measuring up his 183 x 133 cm frames on the floor of his Kloof Street studio as he lamented the difficulty of sourcing materials in his home town after a six-year stint in Amsterdam.
His completed portrait paintings now all stand proud around the Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery, each with a distinct personality and attitude. This characterization is helped by titles like They look right through me or Is it my fault. The titles bring the portraits to life by giving each character a personal and often witty one-liner and allow the paintings to speak back, as it were.
'Accented Living (a rough guide)', comprises head-and-shoulders portraits of what Maluka terms 'invented heroes'. The portraits are complex composites, starting out life inspired from sources like magazine images but affected by a confluence of styles from hiphop and graffiti to Pop.
Trauma is another thread evident in previous works, such as his tribute to a deceased rap artist in his installation on the group show 'Personal Affects' held last year at New York's Cathedral of St John the Divine. The collaborative work commemorated the life of Cape Town hiphop artist Mr Devious who was shot dead in January 2004. That thread is less explicit but perhaps referenced in the violent explosions of works like It's too late when we die.
The paintings are visually seductive with an appealing contrast of flat planes against more loosely brushed surfaces. The faces of the portraits are all subtly washed and the skin distressed in contrast to the heavier painterly application around them: the barely painted neck in They are not my people is counterbalanced with deeply pink hair.
The overall effect of this gallery of faces is quite haunting and not a little intimidating � particularly given the bold stares of faces like They pray for my downfall. One senses individuals doing it their way through an artist doing the same.
The paintings generally work well as a series. Maluka is a sophisticated painter who extends his play on visual codes within the canvases to a playful game between them. One overused stylistic device is the raised and clenched fist, which recurs as a collage element at the bottom of several canvases. This piston, shattering the visual plane, has a tendency to become repetitive rather than being a useful visual link � something already strongly provided in other ways.
Since new media is one of Maluka's passions, it is significant that he has online work on show. His 2001 Bad For Your Health_Wrong Colour has toured 18 countries and is exhibited here in South Africa for the first time.
A new work, Accented Living (a rough guide), is a web-based project that invites the viewer to interact with images of his paintings. In this way, Maluka uses digital media as an extension of sorts to painting and combines the two media in a fun way.
Maluka's other interests are running a hiphop website for African youth and studying cultural theory. He is researching a doctorate at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis that focuses on urban African youth and their relationship with hiphop culture and technology.
Opened: June 8
Closes: July 9
Michael Stevenson Contemporary Gallery
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Green Point
Tel: 021 421 2575
Fax: 021 421 2578
Website: www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon-Fri 9am-5pm, Sat 10am-1pm
