[Inter- prefix for between/among | Opsia - suffix referring to vision]

[Oscillopsia metamorphopsia] [Oscillopsia is a disturbance in vision that makes it seem like things you're looking at are moving when they're not | Metamorphopsia may cause straight objects to appear wavy, flat objects to appear rounded, and shapes to appear distorted]

Kalashnikovv Gallery presents a group exhibition for April 2024 of four artists, Zanele Montle, Ronél de Jager, Kay-Leigh Fischer, and Maja Maleviċ; a group of artists that blend figuration and abstraction, the real and the surreal. Their work all possesses a process of manipulating reality, deletion, blurred visions, dream-like states, with distinct mark-making processes in each practice.

There’s a distinct physicality in the works of these four artists, working on canvas at scale is a bodily act where there is focus on the whole and on minute details of each work. All four artists break from the traditional bounds of classical figuration and abstraction in their work, creating conversations between their visions in the curated group exhibition Inter Opsia.

Zanele Montle’s solid plane portraits are evocative of the familiar quotidian scenes, invoking a sense of banality and nostalgia through her use of bright colours, disarming the viewer. Her subject matter is often drawn from photos of her past and family, a deeply personal depiction of her own identity and how it is challenged by moving from a Kwa-Zulu Natal setting into Johannesburg where the constant-change-globalism imprints on all that have migrated into its throng. The ambiguous faces in her portraits underpin an inquiry into black identity within the current episteme, the challenge in retaining your heritage while integrating into the heterogeneity of a city. She actively alludes to her attempt at staying grounded within her roots through her Zulu titles to the artworks, linking past with her present practice.

Ronél de Jager’s Too Many Friends series captures a moment of social anxiety in a post-isolation hyperconnected world. Her bright and colourful fragmented florals rest in the moment between decay and efflorescence. With their bright colours and dark background, De Jager harks to vanitas, made in the practice of chiaroscuro, with an intense focus on surface detailing. The works in the Too Many Friends series include nine paintings, each named for a Little Miss and residing in the type of the social (media) engagement the artist experiences. This interplay between the playful ‘little miss’ Hargreaves book titles, and the serious consideration of curated self representation on social media to our hundreds or thousands of ‘friends’, alluding to the desire for connection that feeds our social media compulsions and the equally insidious feelings of disconnect and loneliness amplified by that very same digital world. The lengthy process from inception to completion of a painting is in direct opposition to the immediacy of the digital.

In her large paintings working with harmony and opposition, a tension between colourful and muted abstraction, Maja Maljeviċ’s mapmaking, layered grids and forms, relational elements that come together in a symphony of composition. A classically trained artist, her work is created through a conversation between the artist and the canvas, where physical movement is an important part of the process – never can she be found sitting at an easel. Maljeviċ’s particular style begins with “dirtying” the canvas with a layer of paint that breaks the baldness of the white surface and opens up the space for Maljeviċ’s intuitive jigsaw endeavour. Onto this ground, Maljeviċ builds up surfaces with drips, blocks, bands and waves of colour, searching for harmony between colour and form, line and shape, expansive surface and small detail. These highly intentional and intuitive works form part of her recent body of work where she mutes and constrains her palette, with her titles alluding to a process of seeking through mark-making.

Kay-Leigh Fisher’s paintings are part of an ongoing series Our Encounters of full body portraiture surveying the relationships between people and their environments. Vibrant landscapes portraying familiar environments depict the role of nature as an aesthetic backdrop to an expression of a multiplicity of identities. The artworks reference the visual language of landscape painting in South Africa and the expansive photographic archives that construct our colourful history, tracing how photography has reshaped conceptions of the self through reflexive representation. The figures in each portrait mirror one another through shared limbs and juxtaposed faces, alluding to intersubjectivities in confined and shared spaces.