[...] Il y a le silence. Ses paysages sont presque toujours déserts, mais jamais vides. Les cascades coulent sans bruit, les forêts paraissent immobiles, les chemins ne mènent nulle part. On pourrait croire à des lieux abandonnés, mais ils semblent au contraire habités par une présence invisible. Ce silence participe, je crois, à leur étrange pouvoir d’attraction.
Vincent Fraikin, Researcher
Born in 1941 in Mozambique, then a Portuguese colony, Estevão Mucavele left for South Africa at the age of 16 in search of a better life. He worked in a mine for a year before becoming a cleaner at an art gallery in Johannesburg. He later moved to Cape Town, where he settled in 1966 and took up a position as a caretaker, a job that left him plenty of free time to devote to painting. From Maputo to Johannesburg and then Cape Town, he travelled across the vast expanses of Southern Africa, developing an almost mystical relationship with nature through his encounters with its landscapes.
He discovered canyons, mountains, Lion’s Head, Signal Hill and Table Mountain, one of the wonders of the world, some 500 million years old. These dazzling landscapes, bathed in light, shift from yellow to pink, red, blue and even green, depending on the time of day or the season. It is these “imperial” landscapes that became the subjects of his paintings. Uncompromising in his approach, and seemingly oblivious to Mies van der Rohe’s “Less is more”, Mucavele created almost abstract, minimalist paintings, devoid of sentiment, expression or noise.
We are confronted with paintings that are invariably monochromatic, characterised by a formal austerity and neutrality, as vertiginous as the landscapes themselves, immersed in a magical light. The great Mozambican painter Malangatana once said of Mucavele that his paintings are fascinating and make him a truly unique artist.
André Magnin
