The Brooklyn Rail

Cinga Samson’s haunting paintings, whose subject matter is drawn from his home base of Cape Town, South Africa, strike a tone in line with the present global condition of dystopian unease. The show’s title, Ukuphuthelwa, translates to sleeplessness, which in the artist’s native isiXhosa language is not negative, but rather a state of spiritual alertness. This accounts for Samson’s preference for crepuscular scenes caught between sleep and waking, day and night. At White Cube, the ground floor gallery includes figurative paintings, while the upstairs space consists of mainly barren canvases inhabited by a few animal actors, primarily dogs that are difficult to discern, roaming abandoned milieus. With light emanating only from Samson’s forms, an unnatural source of illumination, a sense of impending threat, danger, and violence is innate to the paintings.

Samson sets up these elaborately constructed scenes, which he meticulously translates onto canvas with the help of a team of assistants. For example, in Ukuwelwa komda (all works are dated 2026 and titled in isiXhosa), a large group of nearly identical figures are arrayed around and within a murky waterway where they surround a ghostly, unpainted figure and skeleton, a signature gesture of the artist. The dark palette causes the crowd of men to blend into the similarly restrained tonalities of the nocturnal landscape they populate, except for the piercing, bright white vacancies where the figures’ eyes should be. The blank stares glow. Rather than impair vision, their ocular omissions seem to enhance it, as if the group is capable of seeing more than we do, while also establishing a sense of distance and difference.

Samson’s characters are not actual people, but human-like phantoms. Floating into view in a work like Isiganeko, they appear below a mysterious eagle and work with a net that reveals and obscures bodies. These otherworldly, spritely beings have taken on human form temporarily, but are a type of consciousness or representation of something other. The evacuation of the gaze prevents the viewer’s identification or engagement with these figures. Samson also sometimes leaves the ghostly outlines of passages of his landscapes unpainted, as in Imfihlo, less a revelation of process than a way of showing the nature of this work as a representation or a construction, rather than a transcription of reality.

Details like the blank stare emerge the longer we look. Samson’s crystalline rendition of every element of the built environment makes the painting more precise than it would be even if this scene was directly experienced by the viewer. Though at first seemingly mimetic, the works in fact replicate technological vision more precisely than their human counterparts. For example, Intsingiselo I has a sense of flatness, delineated by the repetition of identical dogs, which are placed in an impossible simultaneity, as if we see one canine from different vantages in the same instant. Further, distance is collapsed with the same stylized grass and foliage reproduced at different sizes that correspond more to ideas of landscape, than to any actual one. Works like this are thus somewhat of an update of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2) (1912) for the age of artificial intelligence.

Samson develops these works out of dreams, memories, stories, and images. A team of facilitators and collaborators set up his imagined scenario in situ, with all components painstakingly constructed en plein air and live models posing to realize the artist’s vision, making him akin to a director or choreographer. A professional photographer documents the scene and the final painting is not a transposition, but rather a translation and transformation, with adaptations and modifications occurring along the way. Trained assistants, guided by Samson, project and transcribe the photographic image. What results is a composition composed of a learned lexicon of forms that is both imagined and real.

Through his technically skilled work, Samson avoids mere imitation by dealing in symbolism and allegory, topics that are transculturally rich because meanings shift. But Samson deploys referents capacious enough to speak to a wide audience. Scale plays a role, as large format canvases engulf the viewer in vertiginous environments and entangle them in the web of intricate details. The sublime in Samson’s work is readily accessible: the structure of ritual is evoked, but to no discernible ends. These groupings are frozen. There’s a stopping of time that feels in line with our present experience of time as disjointed and halting. Samson’s work asks us to consider the role of ritual and belief in today’s fraught geopolitics.