Tender is the Night brings paintings by Dr Esther Mahlangu into conversation with Pia Truscott’s wire arrangements. The pairing claims neither equivalence nor direct lineage. Born more than six decades apart, the artists developed their practices under distinct institutional, cultural and racial conditions. Here, they meet through different uses of line, structure and repetition.
The title comes from John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819). In the lines that follow the phrase, Tender is the Night, darkness restricts sight and the speaker perceives their surroundings through sound, scent, memory and imagination. Night therefore names a condition of partial visibility, and a form of attention alert to what vision alone cannot settle.
Mahlangu’s exacting freehand geometries draw on the Ndebele painting practices she learned from her mother and grandmother, which she has extended across architectural surfaces and contemporary art contexts. Truscott gathers wire and found objects into provisional structures that alternately support, suspend and tether.
In the works shown here, Mahlangu concentrates pictorial order on the painted surface; Truscott carries line into the room, where directed light produces shifting shadows. Their proximity considers how line can organise a field, hold a form, mark a boundary or regulate movement. Tenderness is proposed not as sentiment, but as sustained attention: a way of holding forms and histories in relation while acknowledging their differences.
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How a Line Holds Form, Memory and Relation
"Tenderness is proposed neither as sentiment nor as a gendered synonym for softness.
It describes sustained attention – the care required to construct, maintain, transmit and reconsider a form without claiming to possess its meaning completely."
Tender Is the Night continues Peffers Fine Art’s programme of placing historically significant Black modernist practices in dialogue with younger contemporary artists. These pairings operate as a curatorial method, testing how proximity alters interpretation and how each practice might unsettle familiar readings of the other. Developed through PFA’s conversations with Pia Truscott and close consideration of her recent work alongside paintings by Dr Esther Mahlangu, the exhibition finds points of contact in line, colour, repetition, boundary and rhythm. Yet these formal correspondences offer only a point of departure.
The deeper curatorial interest lies in the different histories of artistic knowledge, access and recognition that inform each practice.
Mahlangu’s work emerged from the matrilineal transmission of Southern Ndebele architectural painting under segregation and apartheid, before entering international museum systems. Truscott works within a post-apartheid art world offering different forms of access, artistic education and experimentation. These distinctions matter. They shape not only how artistic knowledge is produced and transmitted, but also the institutional frameworks through which it becomes visible, interpreted and valued.
The exhibition’s attention to line also carries particular weight in South Africa, where lines on maps and fences have historically regulated land, mobility and racial separation. In this context, a line is never simply a formal device. It can establish order, mark territory or reinforce division, but also invite a reconsideration of the boundaries through which space, history and belonging are understood.
The exhibition’s title originates in John Keats’s 1819 poem Ode to a Nightingale: “Already with thee! tender is the night." In the lines that follow, the speaker enters a landscape that cannot be fully apprehended by sight; sound, scent, memory and imagination become other means of attention. F. Scott Fitzgerald later took the phrase for his 1934 novel, whose cultivated surfaces and gradual disintegration add a secondary resonance. Keats provides the principal frame. Night names a condition of partial visibility, not an allegory for apartheid, Africa, Black history or trauma.
That condition is made spatial through the installation. Directed spotlights isolate individual works while the surrounding gallery recedes; the uniform strip lighting remains off. The shadows of Truscott’s constructions double and extend their physical lines across the walls, while Mahlangu’s paintings retain their optical concentration. Tenderness is proposed neither as sentiment nor as a gendered synonym for softness. It describes sustained attention – the care required to construct, maintain, transmit and reconsider a form without claiming to possess its meaning completely.
PFA is delighted to present Tender Is the Night because the exhibition gives concrete form to the gallery’s research-led, intergenerational programme. It asks that Mahlangu be viewed beyond the limiting role of cultural representative, as an artist whose decisions of scale, surface, colour and structure remain formally and historically consequential. It also locates Truscott’s developing practice within
longer debates on abstraction, material value, mapping and inheritance. The intended result is not a seamless synthesis but a more demanding field of relation, in which older practices and newer positions can be re-viewed through their differences.
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Symbols Reaching for Symbols: Abstraction in Dialogue
by Nkgopoleng Moloi“Just as Keats draws attention to sight’s inadequacy during the nighttime, the exhibition proposes that we consider different ways of meaning-making.”
Most will agree that Dr Esther Mahlangu’s work has been widely exhibited and theorised. Beginning with “Magiciens de la Terre” in 1989 in Paris — that contentious exhibition about which conceptual artist and scholar Rasheed Araeen critiqued Eurocentric biases embedded within its logic through his poignant text, “Our Bauhaus Others’ Mudhouse”[1] — to the 2004 major international exhibition “New Identities: Contemporary Art from South Africa”, showcasing post-apartheid South African visual culture in Germany. Among these and many others, solo exhibitions too followed, including one at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the first American institution to commission a mural by her, which anchored her landmark exhibition in 1994, as well as seminal retrospective exhibitions at Wits Arts Museum in Johannesburg (2024) and the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (2024).
Yet, the conversation around her work keeps returning to the same themes: she began painting at the young age of ten, learning techniques from her grandmother and mother. She is placed within a matriarchal lineage of women’s work: rendering bold geometric abstraction, saturated with colour and strong black outlines, inspired by the Ndebele practice of painting the exterior walls of homes. Read against that history, her biography is often the way into the practice. The biography, of course, is important in framing the artist's practice. Still, it can also limit our ability to see artists - particularly Black artists - as distinct, with nuanced and idiosyncratic propositions beyond being historicised and culturised subjects. It can often obscure their continued artistic and innovative contributions to the canon in dialogue with contemporary moments.
As a result of these potential limits, it is crucial that each time Mahlangu’s work is seen and engaged with, we do so through a “Both/And”[2] approach described by feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins to explain how human identities, social structures, and experiences of power operate simultaneously rather than in isolation. Through this orientation, we might consider historical conditions that influenced Mahlangu’s art-making, while taking care to reflect more intimate details of her practice seen through the visual choices embedded in the work. And perhaps more importantly, to read her work with an openness towards futurity that allows new ideas to emerge. A foundational figure in the development of South African modernism, Mahlangu was one of the earliest artists to develop a personal language of geometric abstraction. Her work’s relational implications, which anticipated decades of new practices that emerged both locally and internationally, continue to propose formal and conceptual possibilities centred on colour structures, contour, symbolism and edges.
In this sense, Mahlangu poses a challenge, and a productive one. Her work asks us to linger, to rethink, to look again. That challenge sharpens when she is read alongside a much younger artist, Pia Truscott, whose cultural and artistic background radically differs from hers.
[1] Araeen, R. (1989) ‘Our Bauhaus others’ Mudhouse’, Third Text, 3(6), pp. 3–14. doi: 10.1080/09528828908576208.
[2] Arner, J., & Falmagne, R. J. (2007). Deconstructing Dualisms: The Both/And Conceptual Orientation and its Variant Linguistic Form. Feminism & Psychology, 17(3), 357-371. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959353507079089
“Tender is the Night” pairs Dr Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) with Pia Truscott (b. 1999), in line with Peffers Fine Art’s practice of setting established artists in dialogue with emerging ones and letting new connections surface. By considering a long lineage of Southern African art histories, these pairings operate as propositions through which processes, concepts and methods advance dialectically to further fragmentary forms. They allow us to test different configurations of intellectual production in visual dialogue, where symbols can reach for other symbols to produce new knowledge.
Taking inspiration from two literary works — the 19th-century John Keats’ poem, “Ode to a Nightingale”, in which Keats dramatically contemplates pleasure and transience alongside negative emotions, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night”, lauded as his most ambitious project — the show proposes the image of the night as a scene that requires oblique and complex sensitivity to reach towards sense-making.
The nightingale in Keats’s ode, widely celebrated for its rich and intricate nocturnal song, adds to the emotional landscape, through which we are drawn to a forest so dark that the moon and the stars cannot be seen. Only a small and faint light filters through the trees. Unable to see, the reader is awakened to the sonic, the haptic and the olfactory.
Already with thee! tender is the night
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
Just as Keats draws attention to sight’s inadequacy during the nighttime, the exhibition proposes that we consider different ways of meaning-making. In this instance, this requires methods of sustained attention which entail sensibilities of whimsy, curiosity, prolonged lingering and an appreciation of unexpected twists and turns - all of which are important tenets of richer ways of experiencing.
To seriously consider Mahlangu and Truscott in dialogue, we are invited to consider “contemplative hesitation”[1] in the manner that South Korean-born German philosopher Byung-Chul Han described it - as the antithesis to rushed and empty engagement. Equally, it requires sustained attention as theorised by the French philosopher and writer Simone Weil, for whom attention was “the rarest and purest form of generosity” [2]. Taken to its highest degree, attention is on the same level as prayer, presupposing faith and love.
Using the language of drawing, Truscott crafts assemblages that angle and loop through space. By collating fragments of salvaged and store-bought objects - wire, ribbon, thread, beads, buttons, plastic, fabric - she creates intricate topographies that hover between objects with sculptural presence and drawings. At times they are suspended in space, requiring the body to engage by moving around and behind them in dialogue with the shadows reflected based on the quality and placement of the light source. As explorations of mapping and boundaries, her three-dimensional drawings reflect on mapping beyond cartography. Rather, she’s interested in mapping thought and feeling as she orients herself and her practice in different settings. Ofcourse, her work is rooted in abstraction, thereby making closed and complete linear readings out of reach. Artist Liam Gillick describes this and other types of abstraction as “semi-autonomous zone[s] just out of reach”[3]. Just as Mahlangu’s painted geometry transcends fixed symbolic codes that seek to communicate specific ideals, Truscott’s lexicon of the abstract merely hints and nudges at roadmaps and personal geographies - through arrangement and reordering. Each remains contingent on the viewer’s personal associations.
For both artists, the image retains its abstract quality where abstraction can be seen as a tool to enter into negotiation with others (Mahlangu + Truscott and Mahlangu & Truscott + US), as reflected in curator Maria Lind’s book on the topic: abstraction “may reside in social forms but doesn’t need to take on an identifiable social form itself. Contagious and inclusive, it disseminates and multiplies.” [4] For Mahlangu, abstraction is a meeting point of Ndebele house painting, Western easel painting and twentieth-century geometric abstraction. Even as the histories of her practice are storied, the work strips away clutter and communicates complexity through universality. For Truscott, the abstraction is gestural and improvisational. It overlaps with ideas of spontaneous mark-making as method. And yet both are imbued with energy.
Within each practice, the line travels in very particular directions in its relation to the elements of rhythm, balance, harmony, movement, and even texture. Where Mahlangu works on a flat surface with measured precision tied to rigid contours, Truscott produces spatial tension by engaging negative space. Her compositions are open to fluctuations with the smallest interaction - a button, trinket, or ribbon might move a fraction of a millimetre as you pass by it. These very small shifts, maybe even imperceptible to the eye, have a productive potential by expanding the permutations of the possible arrangements that the work can take on the smallest scale possible. For Mahlangu, the surface is stable, flat, concrete. For Truscott, there is non-surface…only the air itself.
Visually, Mahlangu is in dialogue with American abstraction, minimalism and European painting traditions - think Ghanaian painter Atta Kwami (b. 1956), who also merged geometrical abstraction with the architecture of Ghana’s Kumasi streets or American modernist Alma Thomas (b. 1891), whose abstract painting prioritised colour - both in conversation with art histories. Truscott’s dialogue with art history is in the form of an attempt at the creation of a visual idiolect. Take the work Abacus, for instance. Made in the very early days of her new exploration with this body of work, a metal frame is lined with horizontal lines of string on which various components are ‘hung’. These elements - the ribbon, string, plastic, rubber bands, sequins, etc.- introduce and document the foundations of her visual language from which she frequently draws on each subsequent work she creates. Here, we glimpse new conceptions of a vocabulary by an artist building a practice just four years out of art school.[5]
Truscott’s mode of walking and collecting objects that “fall and fly my way” is itself instructive, pointing to how random gestures of meandering and lingering can be generative paths toward making. Similarly, the spirit of the show is explorative and meandering. In any case, it would be misguided to read the exhibition too much from the viewpoint of parallels or different moments of comparing and contrasting. Rather, what feels productive is to consider how the artists are experienced differently by the mere fact of proximity. Our role here is to imagine how each practice, while remaining utterly distinct, reflects surprising connections and misconnections, read through symbols, associations, pattern, order, invention and (il)legibility.
[1] https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=vita-contemplativa-in-praise-of-inactivity--9781509558001
[2] https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/08/19/simone-weil-attention-gravity-and-grace/
[3] Liam Gillick. “Abstract”. Text originally commissioned by Museo Tamayo in Mexico City for the exhibition reader Microhistorias y macromundos, volume 3, as part of the exhibition Abstracción posible / Abstract Possible. https://www.on-curating.org/issue-20-reader/abstract.html
[4] Lind, Maria, ed. Abstraction. London: Whitechapel Gallery; Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013.
[5] Pia graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2022.
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DR ESTHER MAHLANGU
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Dr Esther Mahlangu (born 1935, Middelburg, South Africa) is a major figure in South African modern and contemporary art. From the age of ten, she learned Southern Ndebele mural painting from her mother and grandmother within a matrilineal system of embodied instruction. That formation established the technical and conceptual basis of a practice sustained over more than eight decades. Mahlangu paints freehand, without preliminary drawing or measuring devices, and has extended an architectural painting language across canvas, sculpture, vehicles and large-scale public commissions.
Mahlangu’s work demonstrates that cultural continuity and individual innovation are not opposing terms. The strong borders, repeated geometries and calibrated colour relations of Southern Ndebele wall painting remain central, but their scale, support and compositional organisation change across each project. The shift from mineral and earth pigments on domestic architecture to acrylic on portable surfaces enabled an expanded palette and new circulations through museums, galleries and international commissions. These movements do not detach the work from its cultural history; they make visible Mahlangu’s authorship within a living visual practice that is continually transmitted and revised.
Mahlangu’s canvas paintings reward formal analysis in their own right. Black contours establish pictorial divisions; colour, symmetry, interruption and repetition generate rhythm without reliance on illusionistic depth. Her circular canvases of the 2010s are especially instructive. By removing the implied architecture of the rectangle, the painted border must generate its own field, bringing radial balance and the relation between central and peripheral motifs to the fore. These works show how continuity of visual language can coexist with rigorous formal experimentation.
Mahlangu received major international attention through Magiciens de la Terre, presented at the Centre Pompidou and Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, in 1989, where she painted a house structure. The exhibition was pivotal to the globalisation of contemporary-art discourse, although its framing of artists from outside Europe and North America remains critically debated. In 1991, Mahlangu became the first woman and the first African artist commissioned to create a BMW Art Car. In 1994, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, became the first institution in the United States to commission a mural from her and presented Esther Mahlangu, South African Muralist: The BMW Art Car and Related Works.
Her position has been consolidated by extensive museum exhibitions, public commissions and institutional recognition. The University of Johannesburg conferred an honorary doctorate on her in 2018. In 2024, the retrospective Then I Knew I Was Good at Painting, curated by Nontobeko Ntombela, opened at the Iziko South African National Gallery before travelling to Wits Art Museum. That year, her work was also presented for the first time in the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Mahlangu’s standing in art history rests not only on the international visibility of Southern Ndebele visual culture, but on her sustained negotiation of categories that have often separated communal knowledge from individual authorship, cultural practice from modernism, and the decorative from the fine arts. Her reception has frequently cast her primarily as a cultural representative. More recent scholarship and exhibition-making have foregrounded the formal intelligence, agency and self-positioning of an artist whose work continues to reshape accounts of abstraction and modernity.
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PIA TRUSCOTT
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Pia Truscott (born 1999) is a South African artist who lives and works in Cape Town. She completed a BA in Anthropology at the University of Cape Town in 2021 and a BA Fine Art with distinction at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2022. Working across sculpture, assemblage, painting, collage and drawing, Truscott brings anthropological modes of attention to questions of material value, orientation and relation – how objects acquire meaning, how bodies find their way through space, and how overlooked materials register the social and ecological conditions through which they circulate.
Her graduate body of work repurposed found plastic packaging into painted, layered surfaces that reconsidered the conventions of landscape painting through the material evidence of consumption and waste. Her recent wire arrangements, which she describes as drawings, extend this enquiry while carrying it into space. Wire, ribbon, thread, beads, bottle tops, fasteners and other salvaged or inexpensive materials are looped, tensioned, knotted and suspended in relation to metal frames.
Rather than representing existing territories, these works treat mapping as a provisional act of orientation. Contour-like lines, apertures and accumulated fragments form personal cartographies whose order shifts with viewpoint, air movement, light and shadow. Truscott’s practice is therefore not simply an aesthetics of reuse. Collecting operates as a method of attention through which materials that might pass unnoticed are retained, examined and reorganised.
Their previous functions remain partly legible, but no single object fixes the meaning of the whole. The work instead develops through a tension between intuitive assembly and formal calibration, between the desire to establish order and the recognition that any system of orientation remains contingent.
Truscott presented her first solo exhibition, Making My Way, at the Association for Visual Arts Gallery, Cape Town, in 2026. Her work has also been included in Matereality V2 at the Iziko South African National Gallery and Three-Part Play at 99 Loop Gallery in 2026, as well as exhibitions with Church Projects at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair and FNB Art Joburg, and at SMAC Gallery. She completed the SESSIONS studio programme led by Dominique Edwards in 2025, following residencies with ARP in Rome and Barcelona and at Breakroom in Cape Town in 2024. She maintains a full-time studio practice in Paarden Eiland.
