In his creative process Sibusiso Ngwazi incorporates the familiar characteristics and approaches of his Zulu upbringing: dance, celebration, repetition, ecstatic abandon, meditative pulsating rhythm, invocation, improvisation, showmanship, and gesturing all of which unfold within the context of communal song and dance. These familiar roots have been instinctively translated and developed into a singular painting technique, method and approach suited to his practice, his temperament and his desire for freedom that is both grounded and authentic.
By discarding the use of paint brushes, working with his hands and using sticks and other utensils, the artist is able to incorporate his body movement in the process, while he deepens his hand and wrist movements as an integral part of the mark making ritual. This practice allows him the opportunity to benefit from dance-like rhythmic movements which stimulate the repetition and variation so familiar to him. When this ritual is sustained, it often invokes a meditative and at times trance like state. This process is therefore more akin to an unconscious than sub-conscious mindfulness resulting in a rich and highly varied mark making.
Drawing on his cultural consciousness, communal trance like state births a tonality of feelings that serves as a cue and invitation for the ancestors to join the creative act. The presence of these ancestral spirits heightens the artist’s instincts, allowing deeper more complex narratives and textures to emerge. Abstract marks and shapes often insinuate and imitate fragments of landscapes, symbols, persons, and water bodies. These references are however fragmentary and deeply veiled, allowing a subtlety and openness of form and compositional play. In Zulu culture, the art of suggestion, practiced at a highly refined level, is an indication of how cultured a person is. Ngwazi’s relationship to form, abstraction and representation is deeply informed by this tradition, allowing for playful form dialogue and resulting in vital works with a refined presence.
Ngwazi’s paintings are not created alone, yet serve as departure point for further discourse in other works. The artist typically places several canvasses side by side and although primarily working on one painting, this practice allows marks,spills and lines to migrate onto the surrounding works. Other canvases are cut in smaller fragments, as individual strips of film recalling a single movie still. This method has a cultural philosophical consequence: the idea of a singular work that is perfectly self-referential and compositionally resolved within its own frame, is alien to both his temperament and his Zulu sensibilities, it would symbolically imply the over-importance of the singular achievement, individual or artwork.
For Ngwazi, the frame as geometrical ordering device functions as a window that seeks out compositional logic related to itself and resolved within its boundaries. Ngwazi is instinctually aware of this potentially limiting and contradictory unspoken contract and often treats the outline of the frame as another mark in the composition. Working with the frame, he wishes to affect a transcendental tension recontextualizing its power,inviting expansiveness and coaxing its influence into a lyrical discourse. In his studio, Ngwazi at times is forced to paint upside down to avoid stepping over some of the canvasses which have been placed side by side, this restricts the influence of gravity as a key point of reference in the resolution of the composition. This solicits a fresh and unexpected dialog of shapes.
To Ngwazi his existential landscape goes beyond the self, it is more expansive and involves the mystical, communal, spiritual and the physical world of the self. His world is one of multiple resonances in dialogue; this could partially explain the confidence and fearlessness with which he seemingly blindly and intuitively negotiates his art making. Ngwazi’s world is not one of fierce clashes of form, angst, or foreboding. He is a poet, if there is angst, it is charmed and coaxed and held up to the light. He straddles a dense expansive mark making vocabulary which no doubt dialogues with the darker aspects of existence, but he draws with a singular compositional logic that seeks out resolution and lyricism. This logic is a mystical one, he believes, and is the birthright of everything that is dependent on form for its existence. The act of creating is the insight,the painting a record of that insight, while the artworks come to life when these two propositions are comprehended simultaneously.