- Artyli’s presentation at Latitudes 2026 is sublimated. In a tin-eared tone deaf noisy and hysterical era, we need quiet, gentleness, compassion, reciprocity. We need a subtle merging of the prosaic and passionate. It is this joining that will allow for calm and well-being in what Pankaj Mishra rightly diagnoses as The Age of Anger. The selected artists are all subliminal tremors, quiet quakes, rumours of rain, gentle awakenings. The Sudanese-South African, Raja Oshi, produces desaturated grey-scale works which echo a numbered and serialised world. For her, repetition like ritual is the root of grace. Toni-Ann Ballenden, by contrast, is drawn to wreckage – worlds broken then reassembled. Illumination, for her, lies in error and accident. If Oshi is drawn to calculation, Ballenden is drawn to the abstractly expressive. Both, tonally, operate across a grey scale, though one mixed media work by Ballenden, ‘Obsessive’, deploys a bolder colour palette, suggestive of a shattered mosaic. We see the circle and the square – sublime rulings – but we cannot ignore the nascent unsettlement. Composure is offset by distress. The prosaically normative snagged in some portentous disquiet. Markedly different, we have Asanda Kupa’s tapestries which might seem, for some, to be achingly saccharine, given the Arnoldian ‘sweetness and light’ they emit. The scenes are prosaic, pastoral, communal. The temperature and mood of the works is wholeness. Community, for Kupa, is a sacrament. Martin Buber’s empathic vision – I and Thou – is definitional. We are whom we are because of others. No one is ever truly alone, no one truly desolate. If Oshi’s serialised abstractions evoke a rosary – the sanctity of prayer – then Kupa’s tapestries perform a comparable ritual in a gaudy, roseate, and figurative idiom. Unlike the works by Ballenden, neither Oshi nor Kupa allow for a reconfigured rupture. The sculptors in the mix, Talia Goldsmith and Henri Greyling, beautifully accentuate the wall-works. Goldsmith echoes Kupa’s bright light and Ballenden and Oshi’s grey scale. Her sculptures reconcile the prose and the passion, an embodied stillness and a transfiguring illumination. Dubbed ‘The Light Keepers’, Goldsmith’s grouping of sentient beings reminds us, once again, of the sacredness of community, of connection. By contrast, Greyling’s lone totem made of stone and steel returns us to the earth. Titled ‘Equilibria’, the sculpture channels the immense bandwidth that informs this grouping of artworks. This bandwidth richly informs the art fair’s focus on materiality. Textile and thread, stone and steel, sludge and glass interfuse in all the artworks on show. Theirs is also a bandwidth that connects earth and sky, community and solitude, composure and rupture, this world and the next, art and its discontents … the prose and the passion
Latitudes Art fair: The Prose and the Passion
Forthcoming exhibition