Nazeer Jappie: I need to talk about living room
I need to talk about living room, Nazeer Jappie’s first solo exhibition in Johannesburg, stages absence as both a material and spatial condition. The presentation comprises a group of quiet, deliberately composed roomscapes — paintings that register human presence only through small, telling traces: an indentation on a sofa, a faint stain on a rug, a nail where a picture once hung. On some walls there are photographs, but the reflective glare of the glass renders the faces beneath barely discernible. The rooms themselves are tidy and calm in their symmetry, and it is precisely this orderliness that heightens the sense of something withheld.
Jappie works with controlled lighting, flattened perspective and swathes of colour to produce interiors that feel both intimately familiar and somewhat unsettling. Doorways open onto dark, ambiguous spaces; the threshold between one room and the next becomes a zone of uncertainty. Small details — scuffs, frame outlines, clusters of domestic objects — are rendered with a firmness that draws attention to absence rather than spectacle. Where one expects visible trauma or rubble, Jappie instead offers silence and suggestion, asking the viewer to attend to what remains when humans are gone.
Recurring motifs gather meaning through repetition. A small red light appears across several compositions - compact, unobtrusive and unnervingly watchful - its presence indexing surveillance and enforced invisibility without ever becoming literal. In several paintings, a clock hangs on the wall. Each is fixed at the same time.
Where the paintings move into the territory of the surreal, we find cypress trees. “Where there aren’t figures,” says Jappie, “there are trees.” Often planted in cemeteries, cypress trees have long served as symbols of mourning across various cultures. They appear as tall, upright forms in doorways and through windows; their verticality and stillness position them as witnesses, standing in for memory, mourning and endurance. These elements operate within a careful formal logic: scale, placement and restraint turn symbolic reference into a sustained visual enquiry.
Jappie’s roomscapes do not prescribe a single interpretation, rather; they invite the viewer to linger with traces of absence and to consider how environments both hold and erase histories. The paintings are at once elegiac and methodical — muted meditations on disappearance that use composition and spatial tension to make absence tangible.
The presentation takes its title from the poem Moving Towards Home by June Jordan.
Installation and portrait image: Anthea Pokroy photography