Artist: Ravelle Pillay

Goodman Gallery London presents Revisitations, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Ravelle Pillay, in which paint becomes a medium through which to bridge geographies, timelines and archives, alongside histories of indenture, colonialism, displacement and erasure within the artist’s own family history. The exhibition marks Pillay’s first gallery presentation in London since relocating to the United Kingdom, following a significant period of institutional and curatorial visibility in the city, including a residency at Gasworks in 2022, her first institutional solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 2023, and a major commission for the National Portrait Gallery in 2025.

Emerging after her father’s sudden death in late 2025, Revisitations returns to archival imagery as a way of navigating grief and absence. The title operates simultaneously as “revisiting” and “visitation”, drawing on ideas of haunting and spectral presence associated with texts such as Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. In this vein Pillay thinks of haunting as being troubled by something that needs to be reckoned with. It’s a lingering condition that demands a revisiting of reference material used in previous artworks; of photographs from both what Pillay calls “small” family archives, and from “big” archives, among them those of the National Archives in the United Kingdom, which have been an ongoing reference point in her practice, notably in her 2023 commission, Idyll, at the Chisenhale Gallery. She refers to these British archives as “the centre of knowledge for any place that has been colonised.” Adding: “if you want to learn more about your [identity], go to where it is kept.”

Learning more is heavily layered. For Pillay, discovering connections between her South African Indian lineage and British aristocratic ancestry, not as a claim to restitution, but as evidence of the complex, suppressed interconnections produced by colonial histories. In addition to colonial framing, she notes that apartheid-era racial categorisation obscured the deep entanglements between communities in South Africa, and suggests that her practice attempts to reveal these submerged continuities through archival excavation and, in her final output as an artist, painterly renewal.

The works in Revisitations expand Pillay’s interest in both the instability of the photographs she uses as her source material and the possibility of paint as a conduit of compassion: a way to make things more comfortable for the sitters, to revisit and reimagine each precarious imprint and the details they contain through thin layers of paint tirelessly worked over through solvents, washes and erasure. For Pillay, the associations attached to each image shift as variably as the original photographs themselves. In The Shallows, a group of figures stand partially submerged in water, a tidal rock pool, some wearing white robes that could be swimsuits or baptism gowns. Some figures hold weapons. The context is deliberately uncertain, and her choice of image underscores an attraction to those that remain unresolved or partially unknowable. The photograph belonged to her paternal grandmother and was likely taken in Durban, yet the answers surrounding what was actually happening remain unsatisfying to the artist. Instead, her intention becomes to methodically soothe the emotional conditions of her subjects, whoever and wherever they are.

In Tributaries, a bank of willow trees line the Msunduzi or “Dusi” River in KwaZulu-Natal, rendered in a violet hue associated with the stamps photographers once used to mark packaging and studio photographs. Here, the river draws on memories of the impossible condition imposed within histories of indenture: the Hindu belief that once one crossed the ocean, one had erased one’s place in society and could never truly return home. Over generations, displaced communities established new relationships to rivers and water as sites of ritual, mourning and continuity. In this painting, Pillay meditates on this through layered drips, erasure and accumulations of paint that capture both the river and the dense vegetation lining its banks.

Ensemble I depicts studio portraits of a group of “Malay” brides, Pillay diverts attention away from the racism of the original caption, likely produced for a colonial travel guide to South Africa, and instead revels in small details: a dog partially hidden beneath one bride’s dress, the tension held within the brides’ hands, and re-rendering a pastoral European-style painted backdrop that appears to melt forward into the composition. These features become a series of components in comprehending what official archives have excluded. Again, her surfaces are built through washes, erasure and solvent manipulation rather than thick application. Pillay describes this constant adding and erasure as a form of excavation, allowing details to emerge gradually from the painted surface.

The word Pillay repeatedly returns to in describing this body of work is “portmanteau” – a word formed through the blending of others, carrying multiple meanings simultaneously. In this sense, the paintings themselves become visual portmanteaus: conduits and bridges through which unstable histories, images and emotions are layered together. Blending and reworking each changeable moment, the works attempt to address the lingering feeling that accompanies haunting, the beginning of a thought that insists on being revisited. Despite their engagement with grief and loss, Pillay describes these paintings as fundamentally optimistic: less concerned with nostalgia than with the persistent spectral traces that continue to shape her contemporary identity and memory.