Created By
Fumani Maluleke
Grass mat and Acrylics with charcoal (Framed and mounted)
Curator
Luke Chapman
In "Yendlu," a title that translates roughly as "house" or "home" in Xitsonga, Maluleke delivers a visual meditation on dwelling that resonates far beyond its apparent simplicity. What we're witnessing here isn't just a representational landscape but a deeply nuanced exploration of place, persistence, and precarity. The selective application of color operates as both formal strategy and profound metaphor. Those amber-toned structures—humble, utilitarian—glow with an almost incandescent presence against the stark monochromatic world that surrounds them. Fumani transforms these everyday rural dwellings into vessels of meaning, repositories of memory and life amidst environmental austerity. The compositional tension is masterful. The looming storm clouds—rendered with such gestural intensity they verge on abstraction—create an atmospheric pressure that bears down upon these fragile human constructions. Yet the houses persist, neither romanticized nor pitied. This dialectic between vulnerability and resilience echoes throughout South Africa's complex history of displacement, land struggle, and home-making under duress. What particularly moves me is Maluleke's technical restraint. The drawing functions as both documentation and emotional landscape, achieved through strategic omission as much as what's rendered. Those empty windows—dark voids in warm facades—become portals inviting projection rather than mere architectural details. Situated within contemporary South African visual discourse, "Yendlu" participates in crucial conversations about rural lifeways, housing inequality, and the persistent search for belonging. Yet Maluleke avoids didactic simplification, instead offering a visual poem about habitation that acknowledges complexity, contradiction, and beauty within struggle. This landscape is testimony—not to the picturesque, but to the lived experience of place in all its political and emotional complexity. The houses stand as witnesses against forgetting, against erasure, against the storms of history both meteorological and metaphorical.
"Yendlu" presents a striking monochromatic landscape punctuated by selective color, rendered in Maluleke's characteristic combination of charcoal and pastel on paper. The composition depicts two modest rural dwellings—simple structures with tin roofs—set against a dramatically rendered stormy sky. The houses, highlighted in warm sepia and amber tones, stand as the sole colored elements against the otherwise grayscale environment of trees, utility poles, and rough terrain. Maluleke employs expressive charcoal techniques to create textural variation throughout the scene—from the dense, gestural strokes defining the trees to the more delicate rendering of the foreground's snow or sand. The contrast between the heavy, threatening sky and the vulnerable yet persistent human habitations creates a powerful tension, while the selective coloration of the houses transforms them into beacons against the somber landscape, drawing the viewer's eye and creating an emotional focal point.
Created By
Fumani Maluleke
50 x 75 cm | 20 x 30 in
2024
