A meditation on gesture, ancestral memory, and the luminous current of Ozangé.
18 February 2026
Owanto, Do you have a name?, 2025. Glass neon light, 15 × 150 cm. Courtesy of Owanto Studio
In Traces of the Timeless, Owanto turns inward without retreating from the collective. The exhibition marks a profound return to painting — not as image-making, but as an embodied practice of listening: to matter, to memory, to the quiet intelligence of light. Rooted in the cosmology of her Gabonese heritage and shaped by years of activist-led projects such as Flowers and One Thousand Voices, these works move beyond testimony into vibration, beyond narrative into presence.
In this conversation with Brendon Bell-Roberts, Owanto speaks of gesture as ancestral knowledge, of pigment as living earth, and of Ozangé. This boundless luminosity binds breath to surface, body to body. What emerges is a meditation on abstraction not as formal withdrawal, but as a deepened ethics of care: a practice attuned to continuity, relation, and the timeless rhythm that sustains all things.
Brendon Bell-Roberts: Traces of the Timeless speaks of painting as an act of listening rather than representation. Can you describe what it means, in practical and embodied terms, to “listen” through gesture and pigment?
Owanto: To listen through painting is to suspend the will to illustrate. In practical terms, it means I begin without an image in mind. I prepare the surface, I stand before it, and I wait. The waiting is not passive. It is a tuning. My body calibrates to something subtle: breath, pulse, silence. The gesture does not begin with a fixed intention. It comes from a state of reception.
Listening, for me, is somatic—the hand moves before language forms. The brushstroke responds rather than describes. Pigment becomes a transmitter. Sometimes it resists, sometimes it flows, sometimes it breaks. I do not dominate these reactions. I enter into dialogue with them.
To listen through gesture is to allow the painting to tell me where it wants density, where it wants emptiness, where it wants rupture. The painting feels less like an object to construct and more like a space I step into.
Listening keeps things open.
Owanto, Sound of the Ocean, 2025. Mixed media on canvas, 38 × 46cm. Courtesy of Owanto Studio.
Your earlier projects, Flowers and One Thousand Voices, centred testimony and collective healing. How does this new body of abstract work extend the ethics of care while shifting from narrative and voice to vibration and rhythm?
In both Flowers and One Thousand Voices, testimony was explicit. There were words, stories, and visible wounds. The work carried voices that needed to be heard. With Traces of the Timeless, the voice becomes something less literal.
The ethics of care remain, but instead of holding spoken narratives, the paintings hold energetic states. Trauma, memory, resilience, these do not only exist in language. They live in rhythm, in tension, in breath. I am less interested in representing pain or healing. I create a space where something may shift. The works function through vibration rather than story. Care, in this context, is about creating a field where the viewer can encounter their own interior resonance.
You write of the hand moving as if it remembers something older than itself — perhaps ancestral, perhaps elemental. How does your Gabonese cosmology shape this embodied knowledge, and how consciously does it guide your formal decisions?
I come from Gabon, where the visible and invisible are not separate realities. In many Gabonese cosmologies, the ancestors are not past; they are present. Matter is not inert; it is inhabited. This worldview shapes how I work.
When I say the hand remembers, I am speaking of a knowledge that precedes academic training. It is ancestral, but also elemental, like the memory of water flowing or wind carving stone. Formally, this means verticality matters. Repetition matters. Rawness matters. I do not polish away the trace of force. The brushstroke must remain alive. The decisions are conscious in execution but not in origin. I do not think, “Now I will apply cosmology.” Cosmology lives in my nervous system. It informs scale, rhythm, density, and the acceptance of imperfection.
Owanto, I A M, Earth, SOS. Installation view. Courtesy of Owanto Studio
The concept of Ozangé runs like a current through the exhibition — a boundless light that binds gesture, matter and memory. How did this notion emerge in your practice, and how do you translate such an immaterial force into material form?
Ozangé emerged as a word long after it existed as an experience. For years, I felt that what moved through my work was not expression but illumination, not metaphorical light, but a connective force. Eventually, I understood Ozangé as the name for that presence. It is not light in the sense of brightness. It feels more like a connection. To translate something immaterial into material form requires a paradox. I work with density so that luminosity can breathe through it. I layer pigment until it becomes very dense, then I interrupt it with a raw gesture. The interruption creates an opening.
Sometimes, neon light appears in my practice, as in Brought by the Sea, where words like I AM or Earth physically emit light. But even without neon, I try to create internal luminosity through contrast: opacity and transparency, sediment and rupture.
Ozangé cannot really be depicted. It has to be felt.
Owanto, Earth (detail), 2014. Glass, neon light on found buoy, Ø 30 cm. Courtesy of Owanto Studio
The totemic works introduce a vertical presence that mediates between terrestrial and celestial realms. What drew you to this sculptural language, and how do these forms converse with the paintings in space?
The totems came from a need for axis. Painting is horizontal, immersive, and atmospheric. The totem is vertical. It stands. It holds ground and sky simultaneously. In many ancestral traditions, the vertical form is a conduit. It links realms. My totems, often three meters high and painted on okoumé wood from Gabon, are not decorative sculptures. They are presences.
In space, they function as anchors. The paintings surround; the totems hold the space. The eye rises along the totem, then returns to the painted field. Together, they create an environment rather than a simple display.
Your surfaces are described as porous, charged, and almost alive. How do material processes — layering, sedimentation, the behaviour of pigment — become collaborators in the work rather than mere tools?
I allow materials to misbehave. Pigment bleeds, water stains, and layers crack. Instead of correcting these events, I follow them. The surface becomes a place of sedimentation, like geological time compressed into a single moment. Layering is not simply accumulation; it is memory building. Each stratum remains partially visible. The painting records its own duration. When I step back, I ask whether it feels alive. The materials decide as much as I do. Collaboration requires relinquishing control.
Owanto, Do you have a name?, 2025. Mixed media on canvas, 200 × 130cm. Courtesy of Owanto Studio
There is a circular sense of time in this exhibition, where ancestral memory and contemporary abstraction coexist. How do you situate your practice within broader currents in contemporary art that seek to reanimate matter and re-enchant the natural world?
Many contemporary artists are questioning the separation between human and matter, subject and object. There is renewed attention to animism, ecology, and the agency of materials. My work does not adopt these ideas on a theoretical level; it grows from lived experience.
For me, abstraction does not mean the absence of form. It is a way of approaching what exceeds form. I situate myself within a current that refuses disenchantment, but I do so through lived cosmology rather than trend. If the work resonates with broader movements to re-enchant matter, it is because that worldview has always been present in my lineage.
Finally, when viewers move among these works — paintings and totems alike — what kind of encounter do you hope unfolds? Is it contemplative, relational, transformative, or something more ineffable that resists language altogether?
I hope for stillness first. Not passive contemplation, more a quiet attentiveness. I hope the viewer feels accompanied, not by me, but by something quieter. If transformation occurs, it will not be dramatic. It may be subtle: a shift in breathing, a softening of the chest, a remembering without image. Some experiences resist language. If someone leaves feeling slightly more connected to their body, to memory, to light, then the work has done what it needed to do.
Owanto’s work is exhibited by Reiners Contemporary Art at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair from 19 to 22 February.
