Riason Naidoo spoke to Portia Zvavahera about her solo exhibition at Stevenson Cape Town earlier this year
Percy Mabandu considers paint, spirit and the spectral in the work of Zimbabwe’s Portia Zvavahera
A haunted brilliance issues from the paintings of Portia Zvavahera currently on exhibit at Stevenson Gallery in the hipster enclave of Braamfontein, Joburg.
The show, What I See Beyond Feeling, builds on the success and themes of her previous solo exhibition, I Can Feel It In My Eyes. While the earlier work celebrated and explored the charmed rapture of love in public spaces - the lush gardens of Harare's Central Park - Zvavahera's new work takes an otherworldly turn.
Her characters and motifs are rendered in the fluid, indeterminate visual language of dreams. The result is a morbid world of floating beings that are as sublime as they are unnerving. Zvavahera describes the pictures as an attempt to capture "'what I see with spiritual eyes".