Nano Le Face

Nano Le Face (b. 1999, Tshwane, South Africa) is a self-taught artist based in Cape Town, whose drawings explore the desires, anxieties, and contradictions of contemporary life. Working primarily in pencil, wax crayon, and marker on paper, his practice moves between figuration, abstraction, and text, drawing freely from the visual languages of popular culture, fashion, advertising, film, and social media. He studied Film Arts at the Open Window Institute in Pretoria and AFDA in Johannesburg before pursuing fine art.

Le Face has developed a distinctive cast of characters who recur across his drawings, some drawn from people he knows and others invented. Predominantly female, his elongated figures inhabit a world shaped by glamour and aspiration as much as boredom, loneliness, desire, and self-doubt. Often drawing on idealised representations of white femininity circulated through fashion, advertising, and popular media, Le Face uses these figures to probe the ways images mediate desire, identity, and self-perception. Their apparent confidence frequently gives way to moments of vulnerability or existential unease, revealing the instability beneath contemporary performances of beauty, pleasure, and success.

Language is integral to this world. Fragments of conversation, confessions, jokes, and appropriated phrases appear alongside and within his images, creating an ambiguous interplay between private thought and collective cultural language. Earlier works drew on online content, women's magazines, film, and literature, recontextualising found phrases as devices for storytelling and social commentary. Across more recent works, text functions variously as dialogue, internal monologue, punchline, and interruption, tempering the apparent lightness of his imagery with psychological tension.

The immediacy of Le Face's materials is central to his approach. During the COVID-19 pandemic, limited access to conventional art supplies prompted him to work increasingly with found paper, including discarded packaging, pages from old novels, and used notepads. His drawings retain the informality of these origins: handwritten text, visible corrections, and seemingly spontaneous mark-making sit alongside a graphic visual language that resists conventional distinctions between drawing, illustration, and finished artwork. Each stand-alone work bears the initials “RM”, an adaptation of the trademark symbol “TM” that simultaneously references the “R. Mutt” signature on Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917), extending Le Face's interest in appropriation, authorship, and the circulation of images.

Le Face completed a two-month residency at GUILD Residency in Cape Town in 2023, during which he began working at a significantly larger scale. The residency culminated in his first solo exhibition with Southern Guild, Honey, I'm Not Doing So Well (2023). In 2026, he became the inaugural artist-in-residence at GIRLS GALLERY in Cape Town, transforming the gallery into his studio for a month before presenting his second solo exhibition, This Party Sucks Without You. Recent group exhibitions include GIRLS TOO: TOO MUCH, NEVER ENOUGH at LEMKUS Gallery, Cape Town (2025); GIRLS 3000 at Everard Read Cape Town (2026); and Chapter 3 at AITY Gallery, Franschhoek (2026). His work has also been presented at U-Haul Art Fair, New York; RMB Latitudes Art Fair, Johannesburg; and Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg.