Once upon a time David Koloane enunciated: ‘Apartheid was a politics of space more than anything…and much of the apartheid legislation was denying people the right to move. It’s all about space; restricting space…Claiming art is also reclaiming space.’
In the artist’s paintings this claim for space is achieved with exuberance and pain to deploy township scenes of electrifying intensity. His subject matter is found in the frantic buzz of every day commuting, mass protests, high speed traffic and some intimate corners that make up the inner city experience. The colour-saturated expressionism of his images gives life to multitudes of faceless people sporting placards, women working the streets and mongrels fighting for their invisible bounty. Like muted music, the images evoke the restless speed and confusion of a complex socio-political landscape, and the multiple urban anxieties in permanent mutation.