CHEMU NG'OK

The presentation is dominated by six ambitiously scaled acrylic and oil on canvases, including a diptych measuring over three metres in length, all presenting hazily rendered figural assemblies in a high-key palette. Ng’ok’s exhibition also includes two new gestural abstractions in the style of work presented in her 2023 debut solo in London with the gallery, The Longing.

Collectively, the new paintings reflect on the meaning of community and family, as well as the resonances and afterlives of ancestors. The artist, skilfully deploys form, colour and line to negotiate the transitory as well as transitionary states of human life, capturing the ambivalence in forms and structures within her paintings. While informed by the swirl of thoughts and emotions prompted by lives in transition, Ng’ok’s new paintings remain consistent with her broader ambition to transform psychological states into physical form.

During the production of these works in Nairobi, she kept a journal closely linked to her practice. Its entries emerged as lean, aphoristic reflections. “A lot of my practice is rooted in making the intangible idea real or a physical presence,” she wrote. “Painting is making fleeting moments real, anchoring them into a physical archive.” Elsewhere, she describes her paintings as rendering “that which is experienced in real time – a memory, a longing, a feeling, a trace – onto the canvas in the form of lines, coding, dashes, commas.”

Her journal also reflects on the gregarious figural assemblies that dominate her compositions: “And the unseen community. Those we remember or are yet to meet. Those who have come before us, before we were even born. A family tree passed down the line (generations). In these paintings I am painting a community and they are dressed for both special occasions and the (banal) everyday. They are elders, they are ancestors, they are adults? Children? They are a group of people who make up a global village. African village portraits of a community. And they are not always visible to the eye. Nothing is as it seems. Both a physiological terrain of memory, but also a moment of the now and lucidity.”

East Africa has produced a rich lineage of psychologically attuned painters whose work explores community, memory and the spirit world. While Ng’ok’s work shares affinities with this tradition, it resists categorisation. Her work charts its own path. Her bold canvases visualise the emergence of a community, one whose identity is yet to be fully formed. In her new work, she depicts individual subjects as separate yet connected to others.

Colour is central to Ng’ok’s new work. Rendered in vibrant oils, her group scenes are animated by vivid yellows, pinks and other celebratory tones. This celebratory undertow forms part of Ng’ok’s larger exploration of painting as a means of giving enduring form to fleeting emotional states and moments of human connection. The lightness of her palette, coupled with the archetypal nature of her figures, gestures to the possibility of transcendence – and with it a spiritual resolution that comes with forming a community yet to be formed.