Two SA artists take New York by storm with their compelling exhibitions

After decades of neglect, SA painting is enjoying a full-blown moment in the northern hemisphere.

Following shortly on assured solo shows in 2019 by Lisa Brice in London, Alexandra Karakashian in Madrid and Simphiwe Ndzube in Bucharest, Cinga Samson from Cape Town and Serge Alain Nitegeka from Johannesburg are currently exhibiting in New York. Yes baby, New York! Where careers are sanctified and bank balances recalibrated.

The propulsive lift-off of Samson's career was heralded two years ago with collectors literally jostling for his work at a New York art fair. This has culminated in a show of 28 new paintings with Emmanuel Perrotin. An enfant terrible of contemporary art dealers, the Frenchman is best known for his association with artist Maurizio Cattelan.

Last year Perrotin broke social media when he exhibited a Cattelan sculpture, a fresh banana duct-taped to a wall, at Art Basel Miami Beach.

For Joburg-based Nitegeka, who was born in Rwanda in 1983, this is his fourth show with Marianne Boesky, daughter of US stock trader and art collector Ivan Boesky.

Not since Christo Coetzee exhibited his assemblage painting Butterfly Lightning in a Diamond (1960), an eccentric work composed of oil paint, bicycle parts, candlesticks, ping-pong balls, sand, wire and wood, at MoMA in 1961 has SA painting felt so vital and of the moment.

Of the two painters, Cape Town-born and -based Samson is the more self-consciously pop. Where some of Nitegeka's work recalls the high formalism of Erik Laubscher, Samson's ecstatic figuration links him to portraitists like Johannes Meintjes and Tretchikoff. Well, maybe. He is the next Athi-Patra Ruga, for sure.

When I speak about my past to journalists, it feels exaggerated in a way. I don't like it to be the centre of the conversation

—  Serge Alain Nitegeka

Samson's show, titled Amadoda Akafani, Afana Ngeentshebe Zodwa (men are different, though they look alike), is largely composed of his oneiric portraits of solitary young black men with blank eyes wearing fashionable ensembles submerged in foliage and murk.

One vest-wearing figure from his Ibhungane series sucks a red lolly and clutches a Superdry bag. Another wears a green Lacoste shirt with gold chain and holds a bloom. One imagines Outkast playing in the background: I love when you stare at me, I'm dressed so fresh so clean.

Flowers recur throughout Samson's portraits. The artist's late mother nurtured a hedge of cannas. Brands, like flowers, also matter. His assertive figures are always swaddled in voguish swag. But for all their strut and bravado, his flatly painted figures, finished with a darkening glaze, feel strangely vulnerable.

Peril and risk explicitly frame Nitegeka's seven self-portraits at Boesky, which flank an installation comprised of objects the artist describes as "tools of the trade" for refugees.

Nitegeka's works are born of experience. He is someone who has lived through forced migration. He lived precariously in various countries after fleeing his homeland with his family. He settled in Joburg in 2003.

Abstraction allowed him "to create a bit of distance" and mask the traumas of his youth through an "indirect approach".

After a long period of avoiding figures in his work, Nitegeka has returned to the format of his earliest charcoal self-portraits on pine, first exhibited at Stevenson in 2009.

He is wary of the conversations this return to the imperilled figure will inevitably prompt.

"When I speak about my past to journalists, it feels exaggerated in a way," he said. "I don't like it to be the centre of the conversation."

Narrative, lending stories to visual things, is a hazard that confronts all artists. Samson's approach has involved reconciling his inner Frank Ocean with his love of Rick Ross. At least, this is my take on his tipsy narration of his work last year at Blank Projects in Cape Town.

Samson used the walkabout of his exhibition, NaluLwandle, NaliKhaya (here's the sea, here's home), to retell the origin story of his startling portraits.

A self-taught painter who came to the medium in 2006 after studying photography at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography, Samson's early paintings depicted floral still-lifes and groups of menacing white men in outdated fashions.

His dealer, Jonathan Garnham, remembers encountering Samson when he was still a member of the Isibane Creative Arts studio in Khayelitsha, painting with a copy of HW Janson's History of Art open next to him.

When he turned 30 Samson suddenly pivoted from rehearsing northern European art history towards his waning youth and home.

"Youth is a gift," he explained. "I wanted my work to be about youth and life."

Samson's first portraits were of his studio assistant. One day the artist looked at himself in a mirror. He liked what he saw.

"What do I think of myself?" he asked. "Young, sexy, extremely gorgeous, sweet, lovable, cute, talented and brilliant" - he giggled here - "only sometimes, but not all the time."

He wanted his portraits to embody this sassiness, and to be "100% African", to not feel like "the work of black American or French black men".

Like early Prince, Samson's impudence is part of his charm.

I want it, the painting, to be aware of your presence, inasmuch as it is aware of itself. The painting is not for you. The painting is for itself

—  Cinga Samson

Garnham is wary of the hype and distortions that have grown up around Samson ever since Nicholas Logsdail, an éminence grise of contemporary art in London, bought an early portrait by the artist in 2017.

Not true, he says of the rumour that Samson doesn't paint his work anymore, that it has been outsourced to some of his 11 brothers.

"Once the bubble deflates he'll still be standing," said Garnham. "He's a wise soul who has been through enough hardship. It has made him stronger. He's not chasing the money."

If anything, he's pursuing elusiveness - at least in the experience of his work.

"I want the painting to own the space you stand in, the space you occupy when you look at it," Samson is quoted as saying in a Perrotin press release. "I want it, the painting, to be aware of your presence, inasmuch as it is aware of itself. The painting is not for you. The painting is for itself."

Well, yes and no. New York is also the capital of avarice. As is well known, Jay-Z is an art collector. Less well known is that the man who rhymed I just want a Picasso in my casa owns two works by Nitegeka. During preparations for his previous show at Boesky, Nitegeka's dealer asked if he would like to meet Jay-Z.

"I said no. I wanted to meet him! But what would I do and say? My wife was pregnant, I was working 12 hours a day, and I was tired. I'd have made a fool of myself."