Cassi Namoda: You'll be old too one day. Life isn't always young and sweet.

François Ghebaly is proud to present Cassi Namoda’s You’ll be old too one day. Life isn’t always young and sweet., an exhibition of new paintings presented online with June Art Fair, in partnership with Hauser & Wirth and ArtReview, from August 20-31,2020. The exhibition will also be presented at the gallery in Los Angeles in person from August 20 - September 20, 2020. 

You’ll be old too one day. Life isn’t always young and sweet. The phrase floats on the curved back of a hot stream into the furls of the Borderland, where all things spill—limbs and guts and future. There are six faces of the tangerine moon in this terrain, and then a seventh: the moon in the miraculous fold of her middle age. Her with rays that stream in waves from a cap, who glimmers softly toward the center of her Andromeda. A birth: twin moons. Beginning and end, swaddled in mint dusk, bound by the gravity of fleshedness. 

You’ll be old too one day. This is perhaps a story of our fertile ochre satellite. The moon, duly observed in the distant reaches of each tableau, whose light beams gently stamp the cosmic array of selves that inhabit the Borderland. Or perhaps these many selves are the Border—conjoined in flesh, traversed through time—unto whom the heavens cast fates and favors. At one meeting of two cassava fields, a figure walks the edge of passion’s awakening. He assumes a libidinous gesture beside shetani, an azure idol coaxed from distant folk heavens. Heavens whose corners too are bound by the moon. 

Elsewhere beneath the tangerine moon are sisters, smaller moons of peach and seafoam, jostled from the hideaways of their orbit into a battering dance. The planet Venus is their umpire. Nearby, the tangerine moon holds a younger self, vexed and anxious, anticipating her entry into the sixth house, most mercurial, ruled by black iron cross and spire. Then, at the apex of the sickle-shaped mountain which encloses the Borderland, sits the embryo: a singularity, a grain of sand in the basket patiently awaiting its overturn.  

Life isn’t always young and sweet. Scenes and bodies whirl in plump spheres perched atop their mother’s wandering. Wax and wane, the threshold of the sinal curve. Life like a short match set aflame: its beginning as its end, circumscribed, and the moon.  

Cassi Namoda and Wesley Harden

Cassi Namoda (b. 1988 Maputo, Mozambique) is a painter and performance artist who explores the intricacies of social dynamics through vivid scenes that intermingle the heartfelt with the absurd, the quotidian with the cosmic, the joyous with the macabre. Born in Maputo to a Mozambican mother and American father, Namoda uses her work to negotiate the intricacies of mixed cultural heritage, intricacies that reflect the wider cultural dynamics of a formerly colonized nation in an increasingly globalized world. Recent solo exhibitions include Pippi Houldsworth, London; Nina Johnson Gallery, Miami; and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles. In fall 2020 she will present a solo exhibition at Goodman Gallery, Cape Town. Namoda’s work has been included in exhibitions at Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, New York; Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, New York; CFHILL, Stockholm; and Library Street Collective, Detroit. She lives and works in New York.