The Priest
Pieter Lategan, 2026
Oil painting (in progress)
The Priest - Pieter Lategan 2026 (in progess)
The Priest is part of an ongoing body of work exploring inward presence, dignity, and restraint within contemporary African life.
The figure is not symbolic and not narrative. He is seated, inward-turned, and suspended in thought. The posture — heavily tilted, asymmetrical, and weighted — draws structurally from early modern figurative painting, particularly the inward poses found in Irma Stern’s work. These references are not quoted but absorbed, forming the physical grammar of the image.
Colour operates with similar restraint. The controlled skin tones recall mid-century portrait logic, while the silver-white architectural background creates space rather than context. Nothing is described beyond what is necessary for presence.
Set within a Moroccan context, The Priest reflects a living African religious landscape without illustration or spectacle. The painting resists explanation. It asks for attention rather than interpretation.
This work belongs to what I describe as Quiet Monumentalism — a contemporary painterly language concerned with weight, stillness, and the authority of silence.
— Pieter Lategan
Pretoria, South Africa
2026
