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You can instantly relate to Mpho Machate’s craft. Made from a range of materials and variances in scale and composition, his work is generous, offering many points of entry to the viewer. These range from the obvious allusions to cartography, astronomy and physics, to more subtle evocations of existential conundrums. Occasionally, one engages with a lone figure or a cluster, momentarily grounding our vertiginous odyssey, but the landscapes these figures traverse or occupy remain abstract, recalling cybernetic realities, dispossession and ancestral presence.
As much as his paintings seem to render a geographical world, Machate’s free-form splotches and angular spirals also echo brain synapses and other natural phenomena like the fibonacci sequence. “I’m fascinated by the human mind and how it works,” he says from his first-floor studio at August House, where has been based since January. “ ‘How much of it are we using? We’ve been told that we are using ten percent of it, or one percent of it, depending on how you look at it. How much of it do we have access to as individuals in order to be conscious and know the self?”
The elements of Machate’s style combine into an articulate, hermetic language of inquiry. He works mostly on paper using inks, oils and stencils. He’s been steadfast in mining a recurring set of motifs after realising that “the style I wanted to explore kind of avoids form.” His biography as part of the Meta Foundation’s Meet The Artist video series, captures a childhood in Xanthia, Bushbuckridge, that was endowed with “lush vegetation … dramatic features of the Drakensberg Mountain in his backyard during the day, and the night time, which provided a spectacle of stars…” If his works partially aim at capturing a composite of these vistas, Machate recalls them in subtle ways.
As a youngster, he remembers having an epiphany as he came across the work of Jackson Pollock in a magazine and, later, the liberating feeling of free-form drawing during a University of Pretoria abstract class in 2015.
In 2017, he got a further boost in confidence when he sold out his first solo show at the Turbine Art Fair, titled Touch. “That’s when I saw that (I had) this voice, there is an eye that has no link to the known, whatsoever,” he says.
In 2019, while still working out of his grandmother’s garage in Tembisa, Machate was invited to take part in the JP Morgan Abadali art programme, which culminated with a set of his works being featured in the company’s Chase Art Collection.
The artist says his process usually begins with being outdoors, taking in textures which offer “a great interpretation of existence”. (Some images from his Instagram feed attest to this. There is one of his feet perched on the edge of eroding, multi-hued sedimentary rocks. It captures a similar train of thought to one of his ink-stained hands photographed against the starkly psychedelic surface of one of his artworks.
Machate calls the initial process of observation – be it in the slivers of motion and patterns offered up by Joburg’s Moseley Street or in more tranquil climes – “being in the artwork … not looking at space as empty, but at space as form.” The process then moves onto a work surface, mostly paper. “I use a whole lot of water so I need to stretch the paper so I can drip the ink, splash and splatter, all those kinds of things,” he says of this bleeding onto the surface. “You’d have a different interpretation to the person next to you, so it becomes an internal kind of approach into the work as opposed to: ‘Ooh, this looks familiar. I have a memory of this kind of scenario…’ So the interpretation of the work doesn’t involve the you that needs the attention somehow. That is, in part, healing. That is, in part, growth.”
In order to offer pathways to collective communion, Machate’s marks have to be detailed and balanced, with improvisation giving way to deliberation. It is hard to bypass the charismatic jazziness of his approach, which mirrors a dedication to working diligently – under pressurising conditions – at honing a language that both acknowledges and attempts to circumvent the reflex to be easily commodifiable. To put it differently, the balance Machate aims for marries both this playful restlessness and a stillness, one less formal but important to the proceedings nonetheless. To paraphrase artist Torkwase Dyson in the Graham Foundation talk The Shape of Language (in which she converses with poet Dionne Brand), Machate’s rootedness recalls an ability to contain oneself in the discipline of exhausting the things one doesn’t already know in order to beget something else. It is a worthy point of departure if one seeks to bring their best possible self to a communal site as August House.
The title of a new series of works The Individuation of the Whole (which features art pieces usually no larger than a laptop screen) gives language to this tension between individual development and collectivism. “We are said to have +60 000 thoughts a day. If you stretch each thought, at each given time, every day, you can sommer make it part of your life,” he explains. “Doing things in repetition; building habits and therefore creating self in those habits. So I try to put all of that into my work. It’s all in the process of becoming a better self.” - Sosibo is participating in a Writer’s Residency at August House facilitated by the African Art Content an art journalism development project.
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