Consider that Johannes Phokela is a South African history painter and that history is never finished. It is now and now and now, erupting all about us. Consider that Phokela was born in Soweto in 1966, ten years before the Soweto Uprising and the years of state violence and repression that followed it. Consider that he is a devoted and furtive iconoclast – an artist who hijacks the genealogy of representation of Africans across European art and turns its tropes back on their source. Consider that blue and white, the chosen palette for these works, were the colours of the Chinese and Japanese porcelain imported by the Dutch East India Company – the largest corporation in human history – and the decorations on those became a primary source by which the Netherlandish public visualised non-Western cultures and people.
Phokela interrogates and upends the qualities vaunted by Western Christendom. Original Sin (Inner Circle) (2021), revisits a theme from Rubens, but now only a pregnant Black woman survives the Last Judgment. In the allegorical suite The Seven Virtues (2024), unhinged pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth, erupt into a carnival of reversal and subversion. Co-opting the satirical strategies of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder to his own ends, Phokela depicts a perverse world awash with chaos and violence.
—Alexandra Dodd
