Monomyths

Opening at the gallery’s Tribeca space on November 6, 2026, the works in Monomyths were developed, in part, during Wayne’s time at the GUILD Residency in Cape Town. The exhibition welcomes a deepening of his distinctive visual language, in which the body is progressively distilled through repetition, intuition, and line.

There is a moment in the making of Wayne’s paintings when the image ceases to belong entirely to him. The figure always begins as a sketch; drawn again and again, altered and reduced until something slips free from conscious intention. Wayne sometimes draws with his non-dominant hand or with his eyes closed. Soon, anatomy gives way to intuition, control to surrender, and likeness to something less easily named. “I want to find truth in the origins of things,” he says. Through this iterative process, Wayne seeks to free the image from the particulars of reality, moving towards an essential form that feels at once newly made and ancient. “Maybe when I am old,” he says, “I will be just a line. Just a single line.”

This pursuit of truth lies at the centre of Monomyths. At the origin of Wayne’s enquiry is his father, whose image exists behind and within the figures that populate his canvases, refracted through Wayne’s own likeness and the figure of the ‘pugnator’ – the fighter. Father and son become fractal presences: iterations of a masculine archetype that is continuously dismantled and remade. Here, the fighter is not a symbol of violence or physical prowess, but a vessel through which Wayne examines inheritance, vulnerability, and spiritual endurance.

Wayne’s ongoing Pugnatores series traces the evolution of a figure that has occupied his practice for several years. Derived from ‘pugna’, the Latin word for fight, Wayne’s ‘pugnator’ gives bodily form to an interior struggle: the ongoing confrontation with questions of identity, purpose, and selfhood. These figures are marked by physical contradictions. Their distorted, sculptural bodies remain emphatically vital: abbreviated anatomies carry palpable weight. They are buoyant yet rooted, capable of sudden movement yet resolutely anchored. This physicality reaches a new register in the exhibition’s multi-figure compositions. Where Wayne has historically focused on a solitary figure or the charged relation between two bodies, here the Pugnatores multiply. The singular becomes plural; the individual gives way to genealogy. Figures overlap, huddle, and gather in chorus, forming an accumulated, ancestral presence. Distinct yet inseparable, they suggest different manifestations of the same recurring figure.

During his extended stay at the GUILD Residency, Wayne’s practice entered into dialogue with the landscape of Cape Town. On raw canvas, he built dense, granular layers from gesso, plaster, and fine sand gathered from the city’s beaches. Textured, dimpled, and irregular, these surfaces recall fresco or mineral sediment. Wayne’s figures seem less assembled upon the surface than summoned from within it, emerging like successive layers of an archaeological excavation. He imagines these works as if they have been pulled from the walls of Plato’s cave: fragments or artefacts bearing the traces of another age. Surface becomes an active repository, its impressions, fissures, and imperfections carrying the residue of labour and time. Sand, clay, coffee, pigment, and charcoal carry histories that precede the image itself. It is through this physicality that Wayne pursues what he calls “the object that plays with time, that transcends.”

Monomyths considers recurrence: the forms, gestures, icons, and psychic encounters to which humans repeatedly return. The fighter. The father. The son. The double. The shadow. Bodies confronting one another – or perhaps turning inward to confront themselves. Wayne’s protagonists inhabit this recursive space, suspended somewhere between archetype and individual, inherited image and contemporary man.


For press enquiries, please contact Lindsay De Santis: lindsay@l