Notes

Accompanied by a copy of the certificate of authenticity from Blank Projects signed by Cinga Samson, 7 June 2017.

Cinga Samson is widely admired for his enigmatic portraits of blank-eyed youths posed alone or in groups in verdant landscapes reminiscent of the southern Cape. Highly coveted by collectors, these fantastical portraits, of which Lot 9 is a striking and important early example, originated out of a discrete suite of five works from 2016 in which Samson portrayed fashionably dressed young men in floral settings. Samson had just turned 30. In a shift from his earlier crepuscular studies of flowers and collared figures à la Rembrandt, he started painting his studio assistants, as well as looking at himself. His mature portraits are characterised by the seductive pageant of masculine comportment and fragility.

The current lot derives from a more refined portrait series of flatly painted canvases featuring contemporary subjects that immediately followed his breakthrough Hliso Street series. Also numbering five works, Samson’s brooding and theatrical selfportraits of young men from his Safari Fantasy series confidently adapted rhetorical devices from Renaissance portraiture – notably the disjunction between figure and background – in his pursuit of wonder and enigma. Samson’s dreamy portraiture is strongly rooted in the history of painting, but also owes a debt to his formal training at the Stellenbosch Academy of Design and Photography in 2010. His mature portraits are based on personal photographs and draw on skills acquired while assisting his teacher Deryck van Steenderen on commercial jobs.¹

Although self-taught as a painter, Samson was informally mentored at Isibane Creative Arts, a shared artist studio in Khayelitsha, Cape Town. He initially worked with pastel crayons on paper, but as his financial situation improved shifted to acrylics on paper and later canvas. Lots 10 and 11 are from his debut solo, 700 Wives and 300 Concubines, its title a biblical reference to King Solomon, the third king of Israel, who was reputed to have a large harem. In these expressionistic renderings Samson’s interest in sartorial signifiers and penchant for graphically foregrounding his figural subjects is already evident.

^1. Sean O’Toole (2021) ‘Never mind NFTs, Black figurative painting is the style du jour of the early 2020s’, Cur8, 28 June: https://cur8.art/art news/ never-mind-nfts-black-figurative-painting-is-the-style-du-jour-of-theearly-2020s-2/

Provenance

Blank Projects, Cape Town, 2017.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Blank Projects, Cape Town, Safari Fantasy, 3 to 14 June 2017.