1). Purple Butterfly (2003), dir. Lou Ye 2). Angel (1984), dir, Robert Vincent O'Neill 3). The Lost Time (1999), dir. Raoul Ruiz 4). Red Desert (1964), dir. Michelangelo Antonioni
Word, words, words | Group exhibition at Everard Read, Johannesburg | 19 March - 02 May 2026. Features new work 'Tintin in Hollywood' – reclaimed packaging paper, cotton, archival tape, oil-based screenprint, 1492 x 1159 mm. Screenprinting by @floodhouse_sa
My practice has long been an autopsy of the detritus of progress – the material and ideological debris that washes up on the shores of the Global South. For my ongoing Tontine series, I use salvaged waste paper (fast food wrappers, cement packets, etc) as a site of fiscal and cultural forensics. The title itself, Tontine, refers to a seventeenth-century investment scheme where participants pay into a common fund, and the capital eventually devolves to the last survivor. It is a macabre gamble on longevity; much like the colonial project was; a structure that only pays out through the steady attrition of others.
In this specific work – Tintin in Hollywood – I am operating at the intersection of the ligne claire (clear line) and the muddy reality of the contemporary landscape. By appropriating the masthead of Hergé’s boy-reporter, the intention is not nostalgia, but rather framing Tintin as the ultimate cipher for the European gaze – a blank, unblinking face that moved through distant corners of the world with an insufferable, frictionless moral certainty. While the crinkled, stitched-together topography of the paper serves as a physical rebuttal to the flat stylised banality of both the Hollywood myth and the original comic’s aesthetic. By placing Tintin in Hollywood – the ultimate factory of artifice – the suggestion is of a recursive loop. It is the fiction finally coming home to the site of its own manufacturing.
New work features with Everard Read Gallery at Investec Cape Town Art Fair 2026
I have always been suspicious of promises made in the future tense. They have the curious habit of sounding generous while quietly mortgaging the present. A new work titled "The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights" emerges from this weariness. A work that, like the broader Tontine series it comes from, concerns itself with the polite fictions that underwrite extraction, ownership and the soft bureaucratic choreography of dispossession. And continues to mine that fertile ground between personal biography and structural critique that has, in my case, historically involved a kind of aesthetic necropsy of industrial alienation.
So the central, sculptural form in the composition reads as such a monument/machine — or perhaps the ghost of one. It is deliberately ambiguous: part geological extrusion, part architectural folly, part abstract mining gear-head, or part something that might once have aspired to be noble before paperwork intervened and less charitably, it is perhaps part overweight Taal Monument.
An allied function or optic of the Tontine series is a preoccupation with the corpse of industrial modernity paired with the persistent and often clumsy ways we attempt to reanimate it. Another new work titled "Elaborate artificial landscape" bends toward a niche brand of tragicomedy: the intersection of fast moving consumerism and the romanticised botanical.
This is not a landscape in the sense of the plein air tradition; it is a synthetic geography. It explores the tension between the organic and the manufactured, suggesting that contemporary nature is stitched together from the scraps of what we have already consumed. It’s an elaborate performance of biological life in a pretty, and very still, graveyard.
Screen printing produced by @floodhouse_sa
Works shown –
The meek shall inherit the earth but not the mineral rights |
Reclaimed packaging paper, oil-based screen print
115,9 x 149,2 cm | 2026
Elaborate artificial landscape | Reclaimed packaging paper, acrylic screen print | 800 x 500 mm |
2026
@everard_read_cape_town_@everard_read_johannesburg
