KOLODI SENONG

All images on this page are courtesy of the artist.

Can the politics, art, and ideas of a complex figure such as the thinker, poet, and painter, Lefifi Tladi, be explored through a series of portrait studies? With this series of mixed media and graphic portraits, I seek to show how portraiture can function as a source of information gathering in relation to this seminal figure in the development of Black Consciousness in South Africa.

On Fifi le Legolo, my painting process combines colour washes which explore the work’s surface to interpret Lefifi Tladi’s first name, Lefifi which means darkness after light. The painting fuses attributes of likeness, realism, fiction and imagination to inform his scholarship.

This composition is inspired by Tladi’s intellectual and creative work, political insights and activism within a specific context and time whose elements I synthesis into a portrait that transcends exactitude. Iattempt to articulate, signify and represent the exceptional and imaginative thinker as a complex, multi-layered and dynamic phenomenon who expresses a different experience of being in the world.

In 1966, Tladi’s family was among the last communities to be forcefully moved from Lady Selborne to start a new life in Mamelodi, and before settling down and orientating themselves they were moved again to Ga-Rankuwa Zone 3. This deliberate and intentional suffering through erratic, forced movements from one place to another has had alienating effects which affected how individuals experience their being in the world.

Inspired by the documentary, Giant Steps, here I try to imbue the painting with subtle and nuanced historical, cultural and political sensibilities to note the visual depiction of a ‘self-assured’ and ‘calm’ subject existing in contexts in which he is rendered always under stress, devalued and unappreciated. 

My creative approach combines a build-up of colour washes which I apply to explore and interpret Tladi’s first name, Lefifi, which means the darkness that comes after the sunset. This painting is influenced by Tladi’s acknowledgement of the influence of contemporaries such as Ike Nkoana, Winston Saoli and Motlhabane Mashiangwako as well as the prolific and intellectual Sudanese Ibrahim El-Salahi on his worldview.

I feel the act of painting allows me to freely move between ‘fact and fiction’ in a spontaneous interchange that is framed by Lefifi Tladi’s biography, poetry and art. Here I experiment and probe how painting provides answers to questions about what it means to think through the medium.

Characterised by demonic and violent abuse of the body, the colonial-apartheid years of hammering resulted in an uprooted, confused and self-loathing people who lack any semblance of self-respect and mutual regard. I painted this portrait with the intention of following a particular established tradition of portraiture.