“I use body language as a core element in my work, in an attempt to capture the emotional state of people as they go about their lives.”
Dalingcebo Ngubane is a self-taught visual artist, born in 1997 in Kwa-Ngwanase, and currently based in Johannesburg. Ngubane’s work interrogates emotion in relation to contemporary life. Most of the artist’s influence is drawn from people he meets, how they experience life, and the stories they tell – to others and themselves.
Ngubane works primarily in oil on canvas, employing dramatic palettes and bold linework to create impressions and revelations of the complexity of the human journey. To Ngubane, specific colours code significant meanings, embedding a deeper layer in each work. While human figures are most often the focal point of Ngubane’s works, their undetailed or obscured faces make of each subject an everyman, representative of all.
“These days, everything is fleeting, conjuring feelings of stagnancy, or sometimes unrelenting rapidity. My practice is sometimes about finding a sort of balance between the motion and fluidity of life, which we can get lost in, and the static contemplation that draws us back into ourselves. I try to show this through figurative painting, because I think it enables me to show both action and motion without extreme deliberation.
“I think humans, through race, class, gender and other forms of social identity, are always in competition for time and space, throughout their existence. I always try to give that space to different characters. Through this, I end up with an intersection of bodies that, from time to time, represent the interpersonal relationships that shape our lives so profoundly.
“I paint as I have approached life – with no particular final destination in mind, allowing myself to get lost, allowing for accident and luck to shape the final image. I am so happy to have found freedom in my practice. I do not ever wish to get stuck in one method of making. Just as we found our way from one game to another as kids, art is like that for me, to create without limits, for what I stand for.”
