RAYMOND FUYANA WALKABOUT (23 NOVEMBER 2024)

RAYMOND FUYANA WALKABOUT (23 NOVEMBER 2024)

On Saturday 23 November, Guns & Rain, in partnership with ARAK, hosted a walkabout with author and art critic David Mann and artist Raymond Fuyana, to contextualise and lend critical insight to Fuyana's latest solo exhibition Beyond the Board. 

Mann’s point of entry to Fuyana’s exhibition was that of storytelling, structuring the walkabout according to the points of style, themes, characters, setting, plot and craft.  

Fuyana and Mann, together with the artist’s sign language interpreter, lead the crowd through the exhibition by focussing on key artworks and themes in Beyond the Board. These themes included that of nature and ecology, identity, surrealism, architecture, memory and more. 

The below text is adapted from Mann’s talking points on the day. 

A surrealist’s journey: Storytelling in Raymond Fuyana’s Beyond the Board

David Mann

Raymond Fuyana, together with Guns & Rain curator Laura de Harde, has already touched on a rich point of interest in his work – that of games as “a powerful equaliser between the deaf and the hearing.” Rather than further pursuing this line of thought, I’ve chosen to engage with Fuyana’s body of work through the framework of storytelling. 

‍STYLE | SURREALISM 

Surrealism, both in visual art and in literature, is a useful tool for communicating emotions, ideas, and impulses from the unconscious mind. It’s also a way of making sense of the everyday by partially obscuring or manipulating the ordinary. For Fuyana, surrealism has allowed him to represent and communicate with the world around him, on his terms. The painting Checker III not only reveals his penchant for working and thinking in this style, but serves as a useful starting point into the exhibition as a whole – a vivid and surreal world of colour, shape, evolving games, and endless choices. 

‍THEMES | NATURE & ECOLOGY 

All good stories have a strong thematic thread running through them. There are many in Beyond the Board, but perhaps the more subtle – although no less powerful – theme in Fuyana’s work is that of nature. In almost every painting in Beyond the Board, there is some kind of tree, houseplant, or wild planted matter. 

In many of the works in this exhibition, you’ll notice a flag. This flag, better seen in the work Symbol of Africa is something of a key to the theme of nature. Here, each mark and colour is symbolic of the natural world – plant life, animal life, agriculture, ecology and more – and our role as custodians of nature. 

‍CHARACTERS | SELF-PORTRAITURE & THE STATUE 

Every story is inhabited by a set of characters. Once again, this is true of both art and literature. Artists such as William Kentridge have employed characters like the pinstriped industrialist Soho Eckstein as a way of speaking to the legacies of colonialism and extraction in Africa, while Mary Sibande is well-known for using the auto-fictional character of Sophie to highlight the history and contemporary reality of Black women’s labour in the construction of cities like Johannesburg. 

Fuyana places himself in his work. This is both a way of locating himself in the world, and inviting others into the work – to navigate these surreal worlds with him. He also makes use of an anonymous and recurring character, a statue who often accompanies him in the frame. For Fuyana, this is an anonymous friend and guide, someone to help him move through the games he has constructed, and make decisions. 

‍PLACE | DREAMSCAPES & CRUMBLING FACADES 

“From tiny experiences we build cathedrals,” says Orhan Pamuk.

Central to the story being told by Fuyana is the setting, the world in which all of this activity plays out. Like Walter Battiss’ fictional Fook Island, for which he developed language, currency, characters, and passports, Fuyana’s placemaking employs built structures, architectural facades, and recurring objects and refrains. 

For Fuyana, these architectural references are partly inspired by Johannesburg (the crumbling edifices) and by his home in Zimbabwe (the self-contained units). In this way, much of Fuyana’s conceptualisation of space is through memory. Even the trees in his works are mnemonics of a sort – each one a variation of the trees that grow near his home village of Plumtree.    

‍PLOT | PORTALS & PATHWAYS 

The Palestinian author Adania Shibli speaks about silence and stillness as moments of great power. It is from stillness and silence, she says, that we can draw huge creative force. 

Busy as they may be, compositionally, there are many moments of stillness in Fuyana’s work. In the work Cube Space, we see Fuyana sitting alone in a room, seemingly contemplating which path to take – where to go from here? As viewers of Fuyana’s work, we are presented with similar choices. Through the use of doors and windows, we are given the opportunity to navigate the plot, or to engage in the greater narrative of the artist’s world. 

Beyond being mere entrances and exits, the windows and doors in Fuyana’s works function as pathways and portals into other paintings. Peer through one window and see the plant, the coloured cube, the sun-drenched cloud in the next painting. 

‍CRAFT | FROM PRINTMAKING TO PAINTING 

“It’s called a practice for a reason. You have to keep doing it.” – Andrew Buckland 

Finally, there is the matter of craft. An undoubtedly talented painter, it’s a lesser-known fact that Fuyana first trained as a printmaker. Though much of this influence can be seen in his contemporary practice – the real precision of the linework, the tight and considered composition – printmaking ultimately proved to be too limiting a medium for Fuyana. 

Colour, he says, is something that painting has allowed him to explore and experiment with. Similarly, working more readily at a larger scale is something that painting has afforded him.  

‍View the exhibition catalogue for Beyond the Board here. 

Find out more about Fuyana’s work here.  

‍All artworks and images courtesy of Guns & Rain. The artworks here do not form part of the ARAK Collection. 

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