Cynthia Nair’s paintings draw critically on several aesthetic and cultural influences. One of these is the impressionist, Paul Gauguin, with Nair subversively responding to this artist’s exoticising of the bodies of women and cuisine from the global South (Tahiti, where he was temporarily exiled).
In Nair’s alternative celebration of the bodies, agencies and beauty of women of colour, and her complex portrayals of women’s relationships with one another and their engagement with the world surrounding them, she focuses provocatively on metaphors of food and eating.
These often configure emotions, feelings that can’t be conveyed in written text: repressed or expressed feelings of desire, compelling passions, attachment and sensuality – as revealed in these paintings. Cynthia Nair is a painter based in Johannesburg.
