Samson Mnisi is considered a crucial figure, a pioneer in Black Abstract Expressionism in postapartheid South Africa. Born in Lesotho in 1971, he was raised in Soweto, a township in Johannesburg, and lived in the city for most of his life, acquiring a reputation as a disruptive visionary and deep thinker. A cadre in uMkhonto weSizwe, the armed wing of the African National Congress, and descendant from a long lineage of sangomas, or traditional healers, Mnisi initially enrolled in the Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA) in 1992, a cultural institution founded in 1978 that espoused the ideals of the Black consciousness movement. A prolific painter, Mnisi produced a compelling body of work that has yet to be given its rightful place at the center of any discourse about South Africa’s current state of cultural production.
This exhibition, “Rainmaker,” the first solo presentation of Mnisi’s work since his untimely passing in late 2022 at the age of fifty-one, focused on paintings produced later in Mnisi’s life, including some made for his last solo exhibition, “Man of the Hour,” at Asisebenze Art Atelierin Johannesburg. Mnisi passed away the day after the opening of that show. He was notorious for refusing to sign or date his work, and this is also true of the pieces included in “Rainmaker.” Rather than being arranged chronologically, therefore, the paintings were grouped into clusters based on shared sensibilities, giving the impression that the individual works might have been siblings pulled from one giant canvas and framed separately. Take, for instance, Grey Scale I, II, IV,and VI: All boast a cacophony of signs and symbols, puddles of paint, splatters that violently erupt from the darkness of the ground. This voluminous darkness, or more precisely the impenetrable blackness, is the universe that holds together an otherwise incoherent system and network of lines and geometric shapes. In several of the Grey Scale paintings, a red line dripping down threatens to cut the canvas in two, but this sense of orientation is imprecise, since Mnisi is said to have painted mostly on the floor in intuitive gestures. Parallel lines and tracks, triangles and arrows, circles and dots are carefully positioned as keys that point to a grand philosophical system underlying all these elements, one that asks us to think in a deeper way about the sign’s arbitrary relation to what it signifies.
In another cluster, Messing With U I, II, and III,Mnisi takes this dark sensibility to a different level; the works are somber yet layered, dynamic, and complex. Pieces of found joss paper are pasted onto the surface of Messing With U II and III over brown earthy tones, lines and forms in colors as varied as pink, blue, yellow. Mnisi’s seemingly chaotic yet choreographed mark-making achieves a remarkable balance between the sharper, more angular, and considered shapes and the explosive splatters and plumes of color that interrupt them. Here, Mnisi’s process shows its affinities to jazz—abstraction par excellence—and its logic of improvisation and discordant and clashing tones.
Mnisi’s connection to abstraction—to jazz and its liberatory properties—is a link to the global movement of the Black aesthetics born of the forced dispersal produced by racial slavery. In Mnisi’s work we witness a localized expression and distinct visual vocabulary, steeped in a lifelong interest in mathematical systems, the language of geometry (particularly in Ndebele design patterns), and architecture. For the current generation of young Black South African artists, Mnisi is not only an ancestor but a bridge to an earlier generation of Black modernists, such as Fikile Magadlela, Ernest Mancoba, Louis Maqhubela, and Ephraim Mojalefa Ngatane, working in the idiom of abstraction. Mnisi’s project, and that of many of his contemporaries, was to contend with the contradictions of South Africa’s founding myths, and with what it was going to mean to be Black in a democratic South Africa.
