Adilson De Oliveira on Abstraction Without the Alibi, in the work and practice of Thokozani Mthiyane.
Thokozani Mthiyane, Flesh: sould out III, 2025. Oils and mixed media on canvas, 110 x 170cm. Courtesy of the artist.
I distrusted abstraction long before I understood why. We were told it was freedom. We were told it was purity. We were told it was a painting scrubbed clean of politics. And yet the archive tells another story. Pollock flinging enamel across canvas as if summoning a frontier myth; Rothko suspending colour like stained glass for a secular cathedral; Newman cleaving the void with a zip and calling it the tragic sublime.
Meanwhile, the Congress for Cultural Freedom quietly circulated exhibitions across Europe. The CIA preferred drip to doctrine. Better an existential splatter than a socialist realist worker.
Abstraction, we were assured, was liberty incarnate. It just happened to travel first.
It arrived with curators, catalogues, and the persuasive neutrality of white walls. It arrived accompanied by Clement Greenberg’s teleology of flatness — painting purified of illusion, of narrative, of the troublesome body. It arrived with Alfred Barr’s diagrams, with MoMA’s didactic arrows, with the promise that history had found its inevitable endpoint in the optical.
Freedom, apparently, was a matter of surface tension.
So yes, I hated them for a while. Not always the paintings, but the sanctimony. The way Greenberg could anoint flatness as destiny while museums rehearsed the pageant of heroic American individualism. The stain painters are baptising canvas in acrylic revelation. Frank Stella’s tautology masquerading as philosophy. The industrial piety of Judd and Andre — aluminium as moral clarity, plywood as metaphysics — as if the factory floor had inherited the cathedral.
Ad Reinhardt painted black paintings to end painting. Robert Ryman painting white paintings. Sol LeWitt outsourcing the hand entirely.
History reduced to instructions.
Abstraction became a kind of cultural foreign policy: exportable, ideologically convenient, formally mute where it mattered most.
I stopped, as many do, at Guston.
But only at the moment he defected. When the pink mists curdled into cartoon hoods and smoking shoes. Guston’s betrayal of abstraction was its most ethical gesture. He dirtied the surface. He reintroduced embarrassment. He admitted the figure had never left the room.
After that, abstraction seemed either compromised or exhausted, either a Cold War relic or a market-friendly aftershock, endlessly refinished for fairs, foyers, and speculative storage units in Geneva.
Then I encountered Thokozani Mthiyane.
Thokozani Mthiyane in his studio. Photographer: Ricardo Marcus Knipe
What struck me first was that his abstraction does not posture as universal. It does not reach for Newman’s metaphysics nor Rothko’s chapel hush. There is no theatre of transcendence. Instead: density. Pressure. A surface that feels wrestled rather than composed.
And then the biography begins to matter, not as anecdote, but as rhythm.
Mthiyane’s artistic flair emerges from a creative combination of painting and poetry. That conjunction is crucial. His canvases do not merely display gesture; they carry cadence. There is language in them, not always literal text, though text may appear, but a sense of phrasing. This is not surprising from someone who moved through children’s theatre with the Madcap’s Educational Theatre Company before holding his first solo exhibition at the Flat Gallery in Durban. Theatre leaves a residue: timing, improvisation, embodiment. The canvas becomes a stage for action rather than a field for doctrine.
He has exhibited with Alliance Française and Resolution Gallery in Johannesburg, and in 2015 staged the provocatively titled Whetin dey happen Lagos/Jozi at Mzansi Gallery. Even the title resists insularity; it signals movement, dialogue, and friction between cities and tongues. This is not abstraction as sealed aesthetic chamber. It is abstraction in conversation.
When Mthiyane paints, jazz fills the room. One can almost hear it in the work, the syncopation, the break, the refusal of neat resolution. His own words clarify the method: “The works are only premeditated up to maybe the first gesture. After that, to complete them, it’s something completely different. It’s an automatic process, and I just go on.”
Automatic, but not in the Surrealist sense of surrendering to the unconscious as spectacle. Rather, it is disciplined improvisation. The first mark sets the key; what follows is riff, response, escalation. Less Breton’s psychic automatism than Coltrane stretching a phrase until it frays — or closer to the way Bheki Mseleku could let amelodic line hover before turning it inside out, or how Abdullah Ibrahim’s motif returns altered, carrying the memory of its own journey.
This rhythm is not abstract in the Western formalist sense. It recalls the township pulse of the Blue Notes in exile, the tensile elasticity of Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, the restless phrasing of Dudu Pukwana’s alto, music shaped by departure, return, and interruption. One hears it too in the harmonic patience of Ibrahim’s Mannenberg, where repetition becomes insistence rather than stasis, and in Winston Mankunku Ngozi’s Yakhal’ Inkomo, where tone bends under the weight of grief.
And unlike the choreographed heroics of Abstract Expressionism, this is not the myth of the lone genius wrestling the void. Mthiyane uses his entire body. He mixes paint and soil with his feet. He adds collage, drawing, and textual fragments. He presses found objects, needles, into paper. The surface accumulates like lived experience. It is not purified; it is sedimented.
Thokozani Mthiyane, Flesh: sould out II, 2025. Oils and mixed media on canvas, 115 x 140cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Those needles matter. Many are collected from the hands of nyaope boys, street addicts whose bodies bear the slow violence of chemical dependency and social abandonment. Inserted into the work, they do not operate as shock tactics. They register proximity: to loss, to deterioration, to decades of watching friends disappear. At fifty-seven, Mthiyane is not staging disaster tourism. He is reckoning with attrition. The addict becomes a figure not of spectacle but of burden, an almost Christ-like criminal, forced to die on his own cross, condemned to carry what society refuses to hold.
A Catholic childhood lingers in this imagery. He remembers the church as architectural theatre: sculptural saints flanking the nave, and above the pulpit, a monumental Christ suspended in permanent agony. Suffering staged as instruction. That iconography seeps into the work, not as doctrine but as residue: cross-forms, vertical tensions, the sense of flesh under duress.
If Pollock performed expansion, Mthiyane performs compression. If Rothko dissolved the edge into spiritual atmosphere, Mthiyane thickens it into material fact. His works are less about stylistic reflexivity, less about entering the grand discourse of abstraction, than about channelling innate creative forces. The process, for him, outweighs the pronouncement.
He is not a devotee of Pollock, yet objects insist on finding their way into the work. Brushes left overnight adhere to the canvas and become a motif rather than an accident. He collects worn brushes used by other artists, tools already saturated with labour and memory. The surface becomes a site of transfer, not invention ex nihilo.
There are other ghosts. Francis Bacon flickers subliminally in the sense of flesh under pressure, the body implied rather than depicted. Thami Jali’s pedagogical instruction — do not look at the page, look at the object- echoes in Mthiyane’s attention. He studies people as though drawing them, seeing through them rather than at them.
His symbols do not behave like Kandinsky’s geometry. They function closer to mantra, to chant, a bar of rhythm rather than a syllable of language. One thinks of Miró’s calligraphic looseness, but also of African cave markings: signs that emerge from repetition and breath rather than design. Not the geometry of transcendence, but the rhythm of survival, closer to the cyclical phrasing of marabi, the looping insistence that refuses resolution.
The process itself shifts states of consciousness. The canvas begins on the floor, bodily, unconscious, improvisational, and later moves to the wall, where distance introduces deliberation. The unconscious becomes conscious. Gesture becomes reflection.
In the studio environment, sculpture is made daily and folded into the space. These are not autonomous objects but companions to painting. The studio becomes an ecosystem. In some of the spaces he frequents, he notes with wry clarity, the only consistent figure is the drug dealer — a paradoxically benevolent presence, stabilising an otherwise precarious community.
Thokozani Mthiyane, Flesh: sould out I, 2025. Oils and mixed media on canvas, 108 x 138cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Decay recurs. Flesh imagined through its erosion. Memory as matter breaking down.
These works are not self-portraits, though he has often turned toward self-portraiture. This body of work is an adventure, an investigation into what remains after erosion.
He began at Spaza Art Gallery, moved through Gallery in the City and other spaces, resisting easy categorisation. Since COVID, many works have remained in process, suspended in time rather than hurried toward completion. The fact that they are even on show is a miracle in and of itself, as the gallery rarely comes knocking. Prices are intentionally lowered, a quiet refusal of gallery inflation and speculative distortion.
And yet, in South Africa, abstraction once carried a different urgency.
Under apartheid, literal depiction could be fatal. To represent protest, police violence, or insurgency, too directly risked detention, banning, or disappearance. Poster artists working through collectives such as Medu Art Ensemble, theCommunity Arts Project, and later resistance print workshops were surveilled, raided, and jailed. Images were treated as weapons; paper could be evidence.
Thami Mnyele died in exile. Posters were confiscated like contraband. Ink became suspect.
Within that climate, abstraction functioned not as formalist retreat but as tactical opacity. Pattern could carry coded resistance. Gesture could veil testimony. Surface could conceal what could not be spoken. Artists embedded meaning in rhythm, repetition, and sign, a visual language legible to communities yet evasive to the state.
Even when protest graphics were explicit, they were printed at night, circulated hand-to-hand, wheat-pasted before dawn. The line between poster, painting, and political instrument dissolved. To make an image was to risk one’s body.
Against that backdrop, abstraction was not purity. It was cover. It was camouflage. It was a way of keeping speech alive when speech itself was criminalised.
Seen from here, the Cold War narrative of abstraction as apolitical freedom collapses. In one geography, it served soft power; in another, it enabled survival.
Form, like power, travels unevenly.
Thokozani Mthiyane, Flesh: sould out V, 2025. Oils and mixed media on canvas, 88 x 82cm.
There is another memory from that era, one less archived, but widely recalled. Dealers and collectors would arrive in townships in the morning, collect Black artists like day labourers, drive them to suburban studios, and keep them painting until the light collapsed. Payment came not as wage but as a crate of beer, sometimes a small stipend, often a promise. Art extracted across the day; dignity deferred until the drive home.
A studio dop system: intoxication in place of remuneration, patronage in place of equity. The mythology of artistic freedom resting on structures of managed dependency. Modernism’s frontier romance quietly underwritten by feudal logistics.
Mthiyane came of age in the afterimage of that economy. He knows the routes taken, the hours dissolved into empty bottles, the work siphoned from the body and redistributed as cultural capital. If his surfaces resist purity, it may also be because they refuse extraction. The work accumulates. It sediments. It resists completion on command.
This is not abstraction as purity. It is abstraction as survival.
This is where my taste shifted.
I realised I had been rejecting abstraction’s arrogance, its imperial accent, its institutional scaffolding. What Mthiyane offers is abstraction without the alibi. No geopolitical sponsorship. No teleology of flatness. No claim to universality. Instead, a profoundly personal negotiation with material, history, body, and loss.
One might attempt to align him with a lineage, gesture after modernism, post-minimal tactility, but such alignments feel secondary. His work does not ask permission from art history. It does not rehearse Greenbergian purity nor stage a knowing critique of it. It simply proceeds, improvised, embodied, jazz-inflected.
For someone who believed the story of abstraction ended with Guston’s confession, this was a revelation. Not because Mthiyane redeems the canon. He does not absolve Pollock of his geopolitical usefulness. He does not rewrite the Cold War.
He renders it irrelevant.
In his hands, abstraction sheds its mythology and becomes urgent again, less a banner of freedom than a site of reckoning. Less an export product than an act of making in real time. And in that act, feet in soil, needles in canvas, jazz in the air, memory decomposing and recomposing, abstraction ceases to be a diplomatic instrument and becomes, once more, alive, and for once, this writer can feel its warm stinking breath on his neck.
Adilson De Oliveira is a Johannesburg-born multidisciplinary artist, animator, and cultural practitioner whose work explores history, memory, and Luso-African identity through satire, technology, and decolonial critique. A Fine Arts graduate from the University of the Witwatersrand, he began as a printmaker before shifting toward a practice that treats machines as creative collaborators. Since co-founding The Magolide Collective in 2019, De Oliveira has used mediums including drawing, video, XR, and AI to challenge the Western art canon and blur boundaries between truth and fiction. His work serves as both a resistance and an archive, capturing the complex realities of postcolonial South Africa.
