If people can be measured by the risks they are prepared to take with painting, then Langa is about 16m tall, and as brave as a Kamikazi pilot. He has managed to hijack the current trend of painting's anti-heroic regression into abject pre-pubescent scribbling (exemplified by many, but you could say Tracey Emin does girls and David Shrigley does boys) and make it black. Very black, and very hardcore. It's a stroke of genius. One imagines that self-obsessed Britons who assume they are the only ones who ever get the joke must shit themselves when they see this stuff. It tells one very clearly that if you want to start competing to see who can be the most abject, you better understand black people who lived under apartheid are off the top of the chart, and they'll eat you for breakfast (being cannibals from Africa and all).

A lot of the works were unframed, just treated paper pinned to the wall, in a way that managed to make it look like the Goodman couldn't afford to hang them, which was brilliant. The paper used was often a kind of flecked card that reminded me of the cheap cheap paper which would probably be the only stuff available for really poor kids to draw on. The paper was sometimes glazed with milky resiny stuff the composition of which I was too lazy to establish, being a bit abject myself.

The pictures were done with bic pens and koki pens and very plain plaka-style paint, some smudged and run from being glazed. There were figures and mindmaps and collages, and some dodgy palm trees which I heard some ageing art lovers getting very cross about.

Oh oh wouldn't it be nice to be brave and mad like Moshekwa Langa. Impossible to achieve if you are limited to a South African audience I'm afraid. It wiil take them about fifty years to work out what you're on about. Probably the only reason why the viewers even pretended to like this stuff was because they're shit scared of Linda Givon.

Labels: Goodman Gallery, Moshekwa Langa, paintings