Innate Black

Stevenson is pleased to present Innate Black, a solo exhibition by
Serge Alain Nitegeka, his sixth with the gallery.
In previous exhibitions, Nitegeka has sought to give shape to charged
emotional and political spaces. In Innate Black, his immersive
environments use colour and form to shift perception into an embodied
process of contemplation. Environs alternately characterised by restraint
and abandon invite meditations on the nature of the relationship between
the somatic and cerebral. Spanning sculpture, painting and installation,
Nitegeka’s oeuvre has traditionally observed the formal and philosophical
connotations of the colour black; in Innate Black he considers ‘what is
lived but cannot be explained’.
Nitegeka writes:
It begins with a mark, the first line, and the immediate. The
twisted shape of bacon on the breakfast plate, the smoky acrid
Jo’burg morning air, the rushed and chaotic commute from home
to studio – everything and nothing goes into that line. The act of
drawing, of thinking, of looking and mark-making is an exercise in
the mundane, but perhaps even more an act of channelling the
terrestrial and the primordial. The innate need to make a mark
visits me every so often, in the pristine confines of white walls
before a show or in the secluded studio space with my plywood
surfaces – searching for the elusive configuration of forms and
colours that convey that which is innately immersive and sacred.