Question 01
When you begin a painting, what is already decided and what stays open?
Africa Curated · Chapter I · In the Artist's Voice
Thabiso Dakamela
Six interviews. Two chapters. Practice and figure, gathered as the questions a serious painter answers when there is time to answer them slowly.
Chapter One
The Practice
On the moment a painting begins, the surface that decides when it is finished, and the painters whose hands taught his.
Question 02
Your surfaces are built up, compressed, sometimes scraped back. At what point does the surface tell you it is finished? Is it a decision or a recognition?
Question 03
Who are the painters that shaped how you see paint - not conceptually but technically? The ones you went back to when you were learning how surfaces work?
Chapter Two
The Figure
On what the gaze demands, the pressure that lives inside a held body, and the blue that arrived before he knew why.
Question 04
Your figures often look directly at the viewer. What does that frontal gaze demand of the person standing in front of the painting?
Question 05
There is a psychological pressure in your figures. Something held, contained. Is that something you construct deliberately, or does it emerge through the process of making?
Question 06
Is there a blue in your work that you still do not fully understand? One that arrived before you knew why?
Continue
After the voice, the paintings. Nine works by Thabiso Dakamela. Five works by Yokanna in dialogue.
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