Between darkness and revelation, “Ukuphuthelwa” is a presentation of South African painter Cinga Samson’s suite of new paintings at New York’s White Cube Gallery. Tuning into the liminality of language as well as light, the exhibition’s title, an isiXhosa word translating loosely to “unable to sleep”, frames the works as moments of heightened awareness. Within Samson’s brooding palette of near-blacks, deep blues, and carbon hues, the nocturnal world becomes a site of spiritual and psychological sensitivity.
Across the gallery, figures, animals, and landscapes emerge slowly from shadow. Samson’s characteristic pupilless subjects appear suspended within their environments, their forms dissolving into fields of dense foliage, night skies, and uneven terrain. Encountering these darkened atmospheres against the stark white walls of the gallery, we are pulled into Samson’s environments, where we discover a sense of ritual unmoored from defined narratives. Instead, these compositions operate as symbols whose meanings remain open, suspended between cultural memory, spiritual intuition, and the limits of representation.
The works demand patient viewing, their layered glazes and exposed underdrawings producing an optical flicker that allows forms to surface and recede across the picture plane. Light behaves almost theatrically, guiding the viewer through spaces where clarity is always provisional. In this sense, Samson’s paintings resist the stability traditionally associated with portraiture and landscape, proposing instead that images are only partial gestures toward a more expansive reality.
Yet it is precisely this uncertainty that gives “Ukuphuthelwa” its power. Samson’s paintings acknowledge the inadequacy of representation while simultaneously reveling in painting’s ability to gesture toward the ineffable. The result is an exhibition that lingers in the mind like the fleeting remembrance of a dream and is charged with a sense that the ordinary world contains mysteries still waiting to be seen. —Charles Moore
