Raised between South Africa and America, contemporary painter Nokukhanya Langa honours her mixed cultural heritage with a practice that pushes identity binaries. The interplay between text and image underpins her work as she layers repeated motifs, shapes, phrases and scribbles onto her canvases to reveal an inner stream of consciousness. Moving away from her familiar colourful abstraction, Langa’s new series of ‘Black Paintings’ are currently on display at London’s Saatchi Yates. Noku | Nauman sees the works shown in dialogue with black and white films by renowned conceptual artist Bruce Nauman, who similarly draws upon notions of repetition to delve into the absurd.

Rosie Lowit: Could you tell me a bit about yourself and your career to date?
Nokukhanya Langa: I wonder how far back I should start. I’m South African and American and grew up in both countries. I feel that’s important to add because I have a life of mixed cultural experiences, which informs the way I operate in my work. I have always gravitated towards creative things and having completed my master’s in the Netherlands I went on to do a postgraduate residency at the HISK in Belgium. This felt like a period of time where I could fully explore what I wanted to make without doubting and limiting myself. During that time, I took the approach of asking myself, “If this were the last time I ever painted, then what would those paintings look like?” I was really surprised by how people responded to my work at this point and everything aligned from there. I feel like the more I’ve listened to my whims and interests, the more I have aligned with the people who have helped me.

RL: This exhibition is an introduction to your new body of work, titled Black Paintings. What was the influence behind this new series, and why the move away from vivid colour?
NL: I always try to keep a level of consideration for what’s going on with myself internally and channel that through my work, so that it feels honest and urgent. This body of work is part of a long elaborate story that also involves my previous works. For this show, I was thinking about bringing an interiority – which is how I would describe my colourful works – to an exterior space and wondering what that would look like and what changes it would require of my work. I feel like the black paintings were what I needed to explore that presence. These paintings start the same way as many of my other colourful paintings, there’s a lot of colourful drawing on canvas which I then wash in black paint. I thought black would be the perfect way to hold a more vulnerable expression. For me, these pieces are just as colourful, but in a more subtle way.

RL: Your canvases have a really sculptural, tactile quality, which I read is part of a deliberate departure from traditional oil painting, the medium you were trained in. Could you explain this decision?
NL: I had been painting on traditional canvas for years and for some reason found myself really annoyed with the format when I started exploring abstraction. It felt too rigid to hold what was going on. When I started tweaking my stretcher bars my practice immediately felt more playful, as though the seriousness had left the chat and what I could do with the canvas was endless. I think if these were on traditional stretcher bars they would be totally different paintings. I definitely see myself using the normal frame in the future but I’d need to find my own way of working with it.

RL: Your work brilliantly marries playful clutter with a very sleek, layered, digital aesthetic. I’d love to know about your artistic process, and particularly the inspiration you take from Internet culture.
NL: I feel like large parts of our identities are informed by being online. This is weird because online you’re almost without a body, and all this information we see is just downloaded data on a computer. I’m interested in how the Internet has literally shaped parts of who I am or how I think, and I try to use my time online to see what I naturally gravitate towards or what is fed to me through an algorithm. I’m constantly saving images, screenshotting text or comments. Some of the text in the paintings in this show is taken from images I saved over ten years ago. The other part of my process includes prepping frames, stretching canvases, drawing with pastels, prepping the surface, drawing with paint. Then a lot of scratching away at the surface, painting on top, covering things that are showing underneath. I love how being in the studio can be mundane and exciting and tiring and energising – it’s like a free-for-all.

RL: What is the thought process behind this combination of image, mark making and text? How significant is the language you select, and does this tend to be the starting or end point for a piece?
NL: A lot of times I will sketch a painting out, and then when I start the process of building up the painting. I try to stay as open as possible and really give in to the philosophy of ‘kill your darlings’. The mark-making is intuitive or maybe just from the library of marks I’ve made on other paintings. The language I use also comes from this library of things I’ve saved or heard, but I try to keep the language I choose on a sort of tipping point where the meaning can go in different directions. In the painting a secret third thing, for example, I felt the language in the text was very serious and straightforward and I had no plan to alter it. However, the image included in that painting helped steer it in a more ambiguous direction. I love playing with language, it can completely inform our experiences or identities and I’m interested in how it can be filtered, deconstructed or altered by imagery and composition. I write a lot of things in my under drawings which often end up being concealed. I also write with paint, which I end up painting over, so some of the paintings are like palimpsests.

RL: Your current show at Saatchi Yates places your works in dialogue with Bruce Nauman’s renowned black-and-white films. Could you tell me a bit about the influence Nauman has had on your practice? How do you think seeing your work in conversation with his shapes viewers’ experience of the exhibition?
NL: Nauman is a legend. I’ve loved taking a deeper dive into his work while thinking about the show. I definitely made pieces intuitively but equally tried to imbue his sort of attitude into the way I work. It also made me want to work with more text and veer away from trying to intellectualise every single decision. In the end, there was a synergy between my work and Nauman’s that was completely unexpected, but then again I was thinking about him a lot when I was making this show. I also feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of a giant and it’s hard to fully know what the implications of that are, but it has influenced the way I work in a really exciting way. I always hope for that sort of inspiration and I feel really lucky to have it.

Noku | Nauman is on at Saatchi Yates until 16 August.