Fumani Maluleke’s latest exhibition combines sound and voiceover narration. His paintings on straw mats, traditionally used for rest and sleep, are no longer only earthed – they are sonic. The artist’s desire to weave the human story, and thereby free the painting from silence, stems from an overwhelming desire to connect the past to the present, tradition to the now. The village matriarch, the quiet reign of women, is brought to the fore. If stories matter, if Maluleke’s paintings are no longer silent, it is because African village life is a rustling, like grass, an articulated universe. The voice of women is the voice of the earth. For it is rural women that form the very ground of Maluleke’s understanding of rural African life, a ground that sounds a desire for connection to a place and its people.
Maluleke’s paintings are distinctively pastoral. A genre dedicated to the depiction – through literature, music, and art – of a rural idyll, the pastoral holds fast to agrarian tradition. This idealized vision of nature and people first appear in Hellenistic and Roman wall paintings. Revived in Renaissance Italy, it is the defining trope in Maluleke’s paintings. We see a young girl running through a grass field … two mud-made homes sedately resting between a thicket and a shading tree. A mother and child, the mother carrying an umbrella, walking along a dusty lane. Then again, three women are pounding wheat in a giant gourd. Another carries a thick sheaf of grass on her head, while yet another weaves the grass with the aid of a loom. In all of Maluleke’s paintings, whether peopled or not, the mood conveyed is one of sonority, of restfulness and ease. Leisure and labour are inextricable. For what matters most for the artist is the co-existential – the harmonious interrelation of human beings and the land that is both a nurturing ground and a home.
In a time as geopolitically combustible as ours, in which psychic and physical violence is the new normal, Maluleke’s gentle paintings are a salutary riposte. His art places love and compassion at its centre – the hallmark of the works’ defining spirit, Ubuntu, the Southern African lore that we are whom we are because of others. It is this vital collective spirit – which places the African woman centre-stage – that courses through Maluleke’s art. It is a spirit that informs the formal decision to work on grass mats, and the governing rural theme, that give the art its content. While the paintings are idyllic, at no point does Maluleke ignore the ghost of colonialism, or the incursion of industrialization. A railway track, consuming by nature, reminds us of human precarity, and nature’s sovereign hold. Maluleke’s pastoral idyll is never quite innocent. Still, it never loses its governing belief in a shared place, a shared belief in an African Pastoral. That his paintings have now become sonic scrolls – songlines of rural African life – reveals a deepening of Fumani Maluleke’s uniquely authentic African vision.
