Hunting Kazumbi 2013

Manuela Sambo made this painting, Hunting Kazumbi, using an unknown medium on canvas. The palette is mostly browns and reds, with some curious blues and greens for the figures, it’s a really unusual combination. Up close, you can see the textures created by the brushstrokes in the background, it has an almost velvety quality, but then the figures themselves have this detailed almost graphic style. The patterns and lines on their bodies contrast so interestingly with the rest of the piece. I like the way the ground plane has been handled, this scattered arrangement of red shapes, which I initially read as stones, it suggests a kind of hidden landscape, or symbolic space. The dog reminds me of some of Paula Rego’s animal women, there is something dreamlike and folkloric about the way they both use figurative forms to explore the darker side of human experience. What do you make of it?