ART BASEL HONG KONG 2026
Simon Stone and Baba Tjeko
BOOTH 3C06 

SMAC Gallery is pleased to return to Art Basel Hong Kong with a two-person presentation of new work by South African painters, Baba Tjeko and Simon Stone. Find us at Booth 3C06 in the Galleries Sector from the 26th to the 29th of March 2026. Baba Tjeko “The past is not something one leaves behind. It is something one enters, and it alters.” — Toni Morrison Baba Tjeko’s work feels lived-in, as though he inhabits the interiority of his artworks while painting, lending them lives, afterlives, strands of memory, and vignettes from childhood. What emerges is an amalgam of influences: a kind of DNA sequence that informs a brushstroke or charcoal mark, figures rendered with love, affection, and an enduring capacity for skilful execution. Every mark carries the weight of something felt before it was seen, something known before it was articulated, later given form through language. His figures arrive on the canvas already imbued with history; not the grand, public kind, but the quiet, domestic, deeply human kind. The kind that lives in the body long after the mind has let it go, ruminating in sections that cascade joy and trauma with a genteel appeal, an appellation earned through intimacy rather than declaration. In his renditions of daily African life, an array of experiences comes into view: an umbrella embroidered with the Orlando Pirates logo in one scene; a group posing in front of a taxi in another; elsewhere, a woman in a Victorian-era dress superimposed onto a township setting. History appears fragmented, contested, and site-specific. Memory is reanimated through markers: the Orlando Pirates logo, foregrounding a casual family portrait session, suggests a baton-passing of sorts, where children inadvertently inherit their parents’ interests; the minibus taxi, a Nissan E20, signals a familiar mode of township transport in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet in each scene there is a rupture. Set against these archival images are colourful, graphic portraits — almost poster-like, contemporary, Pan-African, modernist — that interrupt the monochrome past. Often conceived digitally on an iPad, then projected and painstakingly translated onto canvas, these figures move between traditional painterly methods and contemporary digital processes. They do not blend politely; instead, they announce themselves with a bold singularity that insists on being seen, felt, experienced, and remembered. Baba Tjeko is interested in how this rupture might be assuaged: how drawing from both past and present can bridge the divide. He explores the ways in which “history, culture, design, and technology shape the way humans think and experience life.” He continues: “As a multidisciplinary artist, I use a variety of mediums to explore and communicate my ideas, but my current explorations are with charcoal, acrylic, and oil paint on canvas.” With this body of work, he is also invested in examining “the tension between authenticity and performance.” The artist consults multiple sites of memory in composing his work: family images sourced from public participants, alongside the endless stream of imagery circulating online. For inspiration, he looks to the masters — Santu Mofokeng, Malick Sidibé, Gordon Parks, and Mohloua Ramakatane — lensmen who languaged a world in motion, whose cameras served as diary entries of what their eyes encountered. “The nostalgic imagery is reminiscent of my upbringing in the rural Free State province, where I was raised by my late grandmother, Nkgono Maphehello. Mine was a working-class upbringing, where life was defined by simplicity, kindness, love, and a sense of community — values that my grandmother embodied so beautifully.” Ultimately, Baba Tjeko’s work is an act of truth-telling: remaining within the confines of the document while possessing the skill to look beyond its strictures — to suggest, to provoke inquiry, to write wrongs, and to imagine different outcomes. Simon Stone A Puzzle Made up of Parts Richly arrayed surfaces that are populated by various – often numerous – discrete elements, often seeming to stand apart from each other but always linked compositionally: as if these seemingly disconnected pictorial moments are musical notes and, on the canvas or board, harmonise into exquisite chords. Much of Simon Stone’s current work takes the form of separate component images in dialogue with each other across the picture plane. These enigmatic juxtapositions can be something of a delightful puzzle to the viewer who tries to find connections and so to “join the dots”. His monumental paintings are at once seemingly easy to decode, individual elements coming together to make up a unified whole – and yet there is something more here – a puzzle to be decoded, a network that just eludes an obvious and elementary deduction. Rather here we have a nexus of meaning, with many different outcomes, ones that the viewer needs to provide the connecting forces between elements that stand on their own. We may make a breathless, sweeping (and, inevitably, imperfect) exercise in description. When speaking to the artist about this work he advised me, with a twinkle in his eye, that when a painting is not easily giving up its secrets, sometimes just describing what you see can be of help. If one does this, I wonder if it helps, because textual description probably doesn’t really “unlock” the painting. But the wonderful thing is that words are isolated units, and taken together, they work to convey meaning. In this way the act of describing mirrors the act of looking at a work by Simon Stone. The elements, taken on their own, are like phrases that stand apart but the words that connect the phrases, so much less interesting on their own, are what really matter. It is easy to say that Stone’s works are “puzzles”; but a puzzle can be solved and I’m not sure if these paintings really want that kind of inescapability. I think they want to be endlessly indecipherable. And that is the essence of their power to draw one into them. Simon Stone’s work demands time. Time from the viewer, because these are not paintings that can usefully be taken in and processed in the seconds (or nanoseconds) we have become accustomed to give over to images in our million-pictures-a-day world of social and digital media. They demand time from the maker, too. On the screens of our phones, we flip through a multitude of images, mostly unconnected to each other, as a several-times-daily activity. Much has been made – pseudo-scientifically in my opinion – about how our brains have been “rewired” by our exposure to social media and the like. Rather, I think we have developed strategies and skills to process incoming information differently. Our brains, endlessly seeking meaning from the things we see, create linkages and connections, whether logical or absurd. The point is that we seek meaning in a world where so much seems unconnected, confusing or random. With his labour-intensive, richly layered and concentrated works Simon Stone, I would argue, challenges our new-found tendency to scroll down or flip right when confronted with contrasting picture elements. By placing them together, unified by the unique intentionality of the artist, we are stopped in our tracks and our imagination is delightfully challenged. The puzzle is not the picture; rather we become the puzzle that the picture evokes. Simon Stone produces “open” works. He is not dictating that there is one indisputable “meaning” to be found. I believe these are not enigmas that can be solved. Rather I would offer that his work is an array of endless possibilities that are best approached like a haiku and not a crossword. Any linkages we discern are from our subconscious and deeply personal, just as they must undoubtedly be for the artist who makes them. I think we have become too accustomed to find “narrative” in much of contemporary art. Stone is offering us a respite from fixity and inviting us to indulge in glorious, gorgeous, possibility. These paintings are not about parts: they are about symmetries. If the viewer sees fragments in this exhibition, I suggest they stand back, pause, and look for a while. I think then they may see that each work is a whole in itself and each of these wholes, taken together in “Mid Stream”, is just part of the endless flow of imaginaries. Something like the process in our head when we stroll, hike, people-watch or dream. I think Simon Stone is a truly generous artist: he has invited us to look into a mirror of his creation and to see that, in actuality, we are reflected in each work he has made. We are the exact reflection of what stands before. We are the glue that binds the pieces together. If we allow it, we discover ourselves here, in our thoughts and desires and hopes and dreams.