An Atmosphere of Virtue, Thick with Contradiction.
Shamiela Tyer
15 April 2026
Johannes Phokela, Fides, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
The paintings of Johannes Phokela don’t ask to be admired. They unsettle first.
At a distance, they appear controlled, even obedient. The language is familiar, the weight of European Old Master painting, its authority, its discipline, its promise of clarity. But that promise doesn’t hold for long. The closer you look, the more the image begins to slip. What appears virtuous at first glance starts to fracture, and what seemed stable reveals itself as performance.
Phokela doesn’t quote tradition. He uses it against itself.
Presented within the context of the Venice Biennale, in a curated vision initiated by the late Koyo Kouoh, this body of work sharpens its focus on virtue not as truth, but as something constructed, rehearsed, repeated, and maintained.
The Seven Virtues: Chastity, Temperance, Charity, Diligence, Patience, Kindness, Humility, are not upheld here. They are staged. Tested. Quietly undone.
Johannes Phokela, Temperantia, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
There is a simple premise running through the work: “do as I say, not as I do.” But in Phokela’s hands, this is not hypocrisy as an exception. It is hypocrisy as a structure. His figures occupy both sides at once, performing virtue while simultaneously dismantling it. The tension is constant. Between image and intention. Between what is shown and what is implied.
Nothing settles.
Johannes Phokela, Installation view. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
That instability carries into Original Sin (Inner Circle). Here, the visual language shifts toward a kind of controlled excess, bodies compressed into space, movement without release, a sense that something is about to collapse but never quite does. The references to Baroque painting are clear, but the meaning has moved. This is no longer about divine judgment. It is about systems.
Power, in these works, is not distant or abstract. It is structured. It is coded. It operates through access, who is inside, who is outside, and who decides.
Masks, gestures, and symbols of entry and restriction repeat throughout the compositions. They are not decorative. They are functional. They point to a world that is recognisable, shaped by hierarchy, by performance, by the quiet enforcement of belonging and exclusion. Even the idea of “sin” shifts here. It is no longer theological. It becomes institutional, embedded in the systems that claim moral authority in the first place.
Johannes Phokela, Prudentia, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
What makes these paintings hold is that they refuse to resolve.
Temperance appears in spaces of excess, where restraint feels staged rather than lived. Patience reads less like virtue than endurance. Humility sits uncomfortably close to power, beginning to resemble strategy rather than sincerity.
Everything is slightly off.
Johannes Phokela, Original Sin, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
Eclectica Contemporary’s work with Phokela has not been about introducing a new voice. It has been about recognising one that was already formed, and placing it with clarity.
Johannes has a long exhibition history, working across galleries and contexts over many years. The recognition he is receiving now is not sudden. It has been built slowly, often without visibility or ease.
The shift came when the work was given the right conditions to be seen properly.
That matters, especially within the context of a fair, where attention is fragmented, and decisions are often made quickly. Phokela’s paintings resist that speed. They slow the viewer down. They ask for time and, in doing so, separate themselves from everything around them.
Johannes Phokela, Justitia, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
Subsequent presentations, from The Seven Virtues at FNB Art Joburg in 2024 to the expansion into Original Sin in 2025, have reinforced that position. The work has remained consistent, but its reach has expanded. Internationally, it carries the same weight. It does not need to adjust itself to context.
Phokela, however, resists being fixed in place.
He is not interested in being defined by geography or confined to a label. The insistence is simple: not a “South African artist” as a category, but an artist. The work speaks across contexts, and it refuses to be reduced.
That position is not strategic. It is personal.
Phokela does not operate according to structure. He does not follow the expected rhythms of production or the professional codes the art world often demands. He works on his own time, guided by his own belief system. There are periods of intensity, focused, relentless, almost manic and periods of stillness.
But what sits underneath that is discipline, even if it doesn’t always look like it.
Johannes Phokela, Fortitudo, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
He is deeply committed to the people around him. In Soweto, where he is rooted, he carries responsibility in a way that complicates the idea of the solitary artist. He is present. He is relied on. He is, in many ways, a father figure.
That duality between freedom and responsibility runs through everything.
There is also a particular kind of temperament at play. The kind you associate with artists who refuse to conform, who exist slightly outside of structure. It’s easy to romanticise that, but in reality, it is demanding. It can be difficult to work with. Johannes constantly pushes the work, the process, and the people around him.
Working with him has not always been easy. It has been trying. But it has also been necessary. Because that pressure produces something sharper, more exact.
He thinks deeply, and not always comfortably. About painting, about systems, about the world as it is. There is often a sense of disillusionment in that thinking, a clear recognition of how things function beneath the surface. But it is held alongside empathy. A real sensitivity to people, to
behaviour to the ways individuals navigate structures larger than themselves.
Johannes Phokela, Spes, 2024. Oil on canvas. Photo courtesy of Eclectica Contemporary.
That combination is what gives the work its weight.
These paintings take time because they are built through thought. Nothing is rushed. Nothing is superficial. Everything is considered, questioned, and carried through.
Ultimately, Phokela’s work is not about virtue.
It is about who defines it. Who performs it? Who benefits from it?
And in Venice, that question becomes harder to ignore.
The paintings do not answer it.
They hold it in place and leave you there with it.
Shamiela Tyer is a South African gallerist and cultural practitioner, best known as the director of Eclectica Contemporary, a Cape Town–based gallery committed to presenting contemporary African and diasporic artists within an international framework.
