Mpho Machate in fine form doing art in free-form style
The mixed-media artist has fine-tuned a playful, partly improvisational style that reflects his ability to create easily relatable works while never losing sight of his own internal interpretation
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You can instantly relate to Mpho Machate’s craft. Made from a range of materials and varied in scale and composition, his works are 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 in his first-floor studio at August House in Doornfontein, Johannesburg, where he has been based since January. “How much of it are we using?
“We’ve been told that we are using 10% of it, or 1% 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 he 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, 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…”
Machete remembers having an epiphany as a youngster when 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.
While still working out of his grandmother’s garage in Tembisa in 2019, 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 that 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, multihued 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 “being in the artwork … not looking at space as empty but at space as form”.
The process then moves to 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.
“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.”
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 pressuring 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.
The title of a new series of works, The Individuation of the Whole, gives language to this tension between individual development and collectivism.
“We are said to have plus 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.”
Kwanele Sosibo is participating in a Writer’s Residency at August House facilitated by the African Art Content Agency, a non-commercial art journalism project.