[from the pressrelease]
The works on paper in this exhibition were chiefly created over the last two years in Langa’s Amsterdam studio. They collapse distinctions between figuration and abstraction as well as moments in time; some works are prompted by his daily life, others by instances of travel, and others still by events in his childhood in Bakenberg or as a schoolboy in Pretoria. The dogs, trees, cars, landscapes and topographies that characterise the artist’s lexicon recur here in a spectrum of oblique and concrete renderings, the tone of his visual anecdotes echoing that of his reflections. He continues:

The cars, the cows, dogs, figures and thorn trees, they point to different passions and experiences, loss, security, uncertainty. I used to go gather firewood. We lost a young black calf once, I guess it was stolen. We had to go to the veld in search of it after school. It was never found. Dogs bit me, I feared dogs. I had two beautiful dogs that I doted on. They died and I never had them replaced. We had donkey carriages to deliver water and sand, echoes of a more bucolic timeline perhaps. I think about some of these things. The distance that grows vast as I am no longer connected with all this, but which was also a defining factor. I no longer feel the need to tell a story, perhaps to stir up and evoke a feeling of maybe disquiet, unsureness.

The introspection in Proxies is mirrored by the presence of portraiture in this body of work. Langa presents two sets of images, one on white paper, from a series titled Sleeper Agents, and another, titled Gravity, on paper painted black. While both depict figures with inscrutable features through pathways of lines, the former – created with ballpoint and graphite – are said to depict visitors, strangers and messengers holding ‘perhaps a light, perhaps a clue to a new direction’. In the latter, Langa’s mixed-media technique is attuned to the tension of the figures, creating images of spectres that simultaneously reflect and absorb light, about which he says, ‘they are proxies, they are translucent. Ghostly even. They are not me and I am not them.’