IMAGINE BEING BORN into a world in which every part of you is at odds with The Way Things Are. Where your skin colour is representative of a cruel regime. Where your sexuality is considered inappropriate. Where you’re presented with a certain kind of art in your family home, that lends an overwhelming sense of the benign, which is not you. And never was. Roughly, Hentie van der Merwe’s recent show at Wits Art Museum touched with a delicious sense of understated effervescence on all these issues.

Landscape is a genre replete with all kinds of values, not all of them happy or beautiful. They’re largely about ownership. Tinus de Jongh was an artist who lived between 1885 and 1942. In those 57 years, he established himself as a serious, sombre and extremely popular painter and printmaker of South African landscape. And if you were a white child from a middle class family up until about the 1990s in South Africa, chances are, you had a Tinus de Jongh landscape or two (in the form of commercial prints, of course), somewhere adorning the house in which you were raised.

Van der Merwe was and did. And his extraordinary exhibition of oil paintings and drawings with charcoal on paper attest to this. Only his odes to de Jongh’s work are rendered with a sense of joy in his own body rather than anger. It’s a celebration of an adult, queer, white South African voice with no shame or fear.

Evoking on a level the ideas articulated by the late Ryan Arenson in relation to JH Pierneef’s landscape tradition, van der Merwe’s works are about taking the medium in his fingers and hands and attacking the canvas with a sense of exuberance that evokes landscape. They even evoke De Jongh’s predictable landscapes, but with an energy that knocks you sideways.

And of course, in being so, they contain a sense of abstraction. But it’s an abstraction that touches fingers with that of French Impressionist painter Claude Monet, work that takes the idea of landscape and lets it run into itself in a glorious blur of pinks and greys, blues and greens. In van der Merwe’s landscapes in an ‘After De Jongh’ framework, you can feel the texture of the paint in a way that makes you want to eat it, you can imbibe the charcoal terrain with your sense of being in the world.

The exhibition is replete with second-hand prints of De Jongh’s work, placed on patchworked fabric. This touches, not directly, but in evocation, the broekie lace doilies and crocheted antimacassars of a tradition of ‘tzatzkes’ used to enhance the home of many a granny. And while these mid-gallery space installations are less successful than the overall body of paintings and drawings, it is the show itself that is a brilliant finger in the eye of old tradition, giving audacious voice to painting that is skilled without being poncy and joyous where you would expect misery.

• After De Jongh, an exhibition by Hentie van der Merwe was on show at Wits Art Museum until 29 August 2026.