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Ravelle Pillay

The weight of a nail

Goodman Gallery Cape Town

10 February - 23 March 2024

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Goodman Gallery presents The weight of a nail, Ravelle Pillay’s first large-scale solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Featuring a new series of paintings, the show offers a response to the artist’s investigation of her family’s history, oral histories and their relationships to the lush, haunted landscapes of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

Queen and country, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 200 x 250 cm (78.7 x 98.4 in.)

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Creeping through and haunting these works are the lingering shadows of nationhood, heritage and the cycles of oppression experienced by generations of people across space and time, whose lives have been circumscribed by the dark, overt or barely noticeable incursions of colonialism.

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

I never forgot you, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Each panel: 120 x 90 cm (47.2 x 35.4 in.)

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Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

For Pillay, painting has the potential to “peel back layers of history, shaped by the ‘civilising’, colonial gaze that defines photographic and material archives, and shapes collective memory.” The weight of a nail continues her interrogation of colonial legacies and migration and her exploration of what and how we remember. In this body of work, colonial notions of nation converge with stories of individual family members and the dispossession of a family home. Depictions of statues, the Durban botanical gardens, and architectural sites of imagined or reconstructed generational memory, are counterpointed with landscapes dense with vegetation, bodies of water and distinctively coloured compositions inspired by intimate family recollections as they collide with ‘official’ Historic narrative.

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

The saviour (the tenth day), 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Each panel: 79 x 52.5 cm (31.1 x 20.7 in.)

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Central to the exhibition is an image of the interior of Pillay’s great-grandfather’s house looking outward to what would be a garden. This house, referred to by her family and the surrounding community as ‘the Castle’, and the land on which it stands was taken from her family under apartheid’s forced removals. The blue and grey tones in the painting, coupled with the now empty, dilapidated appearance of the home invoke the ghostly residue of the past and the cyclical nature of the trauma inflicted upon families by the quiet violence of the cold indifference and bureaucracy of racist policies that, in addition to financially destabilizing generations of people, obscure and sometimes erase a sense of history, personhood, or pride.  

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery
Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

The firstborn (interloper), 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 120 x 150 cm (47.2 x 59.1 in.)

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Works such as I never forgot you reveal how the interplay of illusion and memory, articulate nostalgic, emotive connections to place. Portraying a childhood memory of Uvongo beach on the South Coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal, constructed through an assemblage of recollections and Pillay’s own photographs, the painting creates a space that straddles the boundaries between reality and fiction; past and present ; memory and documentary. 

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

The weight of a nail, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 200 x 250 cm (78.7 x 98.4 in.)

Unique

 

Enquire

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

The gates, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 200 x 250 cm (78.7 x 98.4 in.)

Unique

 

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Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery
Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

Airs, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 150 x 120 cm (59.1 x 47.2 in.)

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Across the exhibition generational memory confronts colonial and national recorded history, refusing deliberate racial disinheritance and the layered disavowal of the often ignored but unerasable experiences of people of colour. In this way, living memory shines through the gaps in the murky, and often starkly sanitised official records that populate the archive of South Africa’s past.

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay

The lastborn, 2023

 

Oil on canvas 

Work: 200 x 250 cm (78.7 x 98.4 in.)

Unique

 

Enquire

 

Ravelle Pillay | The weight of a nail - Goodman Gallery Cape Town - Viewing Room - Goodman Gallery

Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and their subsequent hauntings and reverberations in the present. She draws from found and family photographs and the material degradation of images over time to consider agency, memory, and life-making. 

Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022. 

Group exhibitions include: Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, (2021) and (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024). Pillay’s work will also be included in the exhibition Soulscapes, which opens at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London in February 2024.

Pillay is the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association’s Emerging Painting Invitational. Pillay received a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015.  

She lives and works in Johannesburg.