“What matters to me most is when a work begins to move beyond the image I started with and becomes something I didn’t fully anticipate.”
The Unstable Figure
James Mokhasi builds images around a compelling uncertainty: the moment a human figure remains visible but can no longer be understood as fixed. Born in Johannesburg in 1986 and still based in the South African city, the contemporary artist works across digital and mixed media processes, moving between abstraction and partially concealed figuration. Faces and bodies surface through dense lines, scratches, distortions and gestural marks, only to recede again. This shifting visibility is central to his visual language. Rather than treating representation and abstraction as opposing approaches, Mokhasi uses the friction between them to explore the psychological, emotional and spiritual dimensions of human experience.
The face has become particularly important because of its capacity to carry contradiction. For Mokhasi, it can reveal identity while simultaneously concealing, distorting or fragmenting it. A recognisable face may contain several expressions, moments or possible identities at once. His figures consequently resist the stability traditionally associated with portraiture. Their ambiguity reflects his broader interest in identity, memory, belief, isolation, mortality and the ways people construct meaning around their lives. The image is not intended to provide a definitive reading of its subject. Instead, it creates space for uncertainty to remain active.
Growing up in South Africa inevitably informed Mokhasi’s perspective, yet he is cautious about restricting his work to a single geographical or cultural interpretation. Personal experience functions instead as an entry point into questions he considers more widely human. Solitude, relationships, ageing, ambition, uncertainty, faith and doubt enter his practice without becoming literal narratives. He does not set out to illustrate these experiences. Their presence emerges through obscured bodies, accumulated marks and visual disruptions, allowing intimate concerns to connect with questions that extend beyond individual biography.
James Mokhasi: Between Recognition and Dissolution
Image making has been part of Mokhasi’s life for as long as he can remember, although his relationship with art gradually shifted into a more serious commitment. His current practice occupies the threshold between figuration and abstraction. He composites images, redraws them and introduces distortion through successive layers until the original source begins to lose its authority. Recognition remains important, but certainty does not. The figure needs to retain enough presence to be encountered as human while becoming unstable enough to resist a singular identity, expression or moment.
This approach connects Mokhasi with artists who have treated the body as an expressive and mutable form. His influences include Francis Bacon, Ibrahim El-Salahi, Jackie Mulder, Dumile Feni and George Rouy. What attracts him is not simply distortion itself, but the emotional persistence of a figure after its conventional structure has been disrupted. A body can be fragmented, obscured or reduced toward gesture and still maintain a powerful human presence. That persistence allows Mokhasi to test how far an image can move from straightforward representation without surrendering its psychological charge.
Line plays an equally significant role. It can describe a form, but Mokhasi is more interested in what happens when it exceeds that practical function. Lines can register movement, memory and tension, accumulating until they form dark and unstable visual fields. Faces, bodies and symbolic shapes appear within these surfaces without becoming fully secure. Darkness often operates as a space associated with the unknown or unconscious, while individual marks can suggest interrupted thoughts, recollections or moments of revelation. Sustained looking becomes important because the balance between what can and cannot be seen is constantly changing.
Building an Image by Undoing It
Mokhasi’s working process begins intuitively, often with a face, a gesture or a visual thought that persists in his mind. Photography, digital drawing, layering and distortion frequently establish the first stage. From there, he subjects the image to repeated drawing, erasure, reconstruction and disruption. An apparently resolved composition may be deliberately damaged or partially removed. He might obscure a face, redraw its features or discover a second image inside the first. Rather than protecting the initial idea, he allows the work to lose its certainty through revision.
Destruction therefore functions as a productive part of making. A passage that initially appears mistaken can become essential once the image develops around it. This willingness to surrender control corresponds with Mokhasi’s interest in works that exceed their starting points. He does not identify one piece as his definitive or most meaningful artwork because his relationship with individual works changes over time. He feels a stronger attachment to the process and to bodies of work, particularly when an image reaches a state he could not have completely anticipated at the beginning.
The movement between digital image and physical object further extends this resistance to finality. Mokhasi does not regard the first digital composition as a finished destination. He is interested in allowing images to continue changing through physical processes and increasingly worked surfaces. Drawing, painting and printmaking offer ways to push this transformation further. His methods accommodate both deliberate intervention and accidental discovery, giving the work enough structure to sustain a figure while leaving room for disruption to redirect its meaning.
James Mokhasi: Many Moments in One Body
Mokhasi’s conceptual interests extend well beyond visual art. Literature, theology, mythology, philosophy and psychology contribute to the questions beneath his images, particularly those concerning consciousness, suffering, morality, death and transcendence. Dante’s Inferno, for example, can operate as an initial stimulus without becoming material for direct illustration. Literary and philosophical sources instead establish conditions from which intuitive associations can develop. Memory then interacts with these references, allowing an image to accumulate meaning without being reduced to an explanation of the text that prompted it.
His current attention is increasingly focused on movement, multiple faces and figures that appear to occupy several states simultaneously. He wants to develop a larger body of work in which different moments or psychological conditions seem compressed into a single person. The idea connects directly with his longstanding concerns around memory and identity. Rather than presenting the self as coherent and motionless, these images propose a figure shaped by overlapping experiences, recollections and emotional states. Repetition and fragmentation become methods for making that simultaneity visible.
Mokhasi ultimately hopes to expand these investigations into a larger exhibition and increase the physical intensity of the work through drawing, painting, printmaking and heavily worked surfaces. Such a development would continue a principle already fundamental to his practice: an image remains most alive when it can still change. His figures emerge from darkness, marks and layered interventions without settling into complete resolution. Viewers are left to encounter faces and bodies that seem familiar yet elusive, bringing their own memories and associations to images in which identity, movement and meaning refuse to become entirely still.
