Pareidolia

Pareidolia, a new solo exhibition by Justine Mahoney, presents the multidisciplinary artist’s first fully realised body of oil-on-canvas paintings. Opening at Southern Guild Cape Town on 12 February 2026 – ahead of the 13th edition of the Investec Cape Town Art Fair – the exhibition signals a significant expansion of the artist’s visual language. Mahoney’s canvases conjure bodies, matter, and atmosphere into a porous meditation on relation, entanglement, and the refusal of singular form.

Mahoney’s latest body of work reads as a manifesto. Across the last decade, the artist’s practice has unfolded through progressive cycles: autonomous chapters and series that punctuate critical evolutions in her way of thinking and making. Pareidolia, Mahoney’s fourth solo exhibition with Southern Guild, emerges after an extended period of labour, shaped by a sustained process of repetition, experimentation and an intimate negotiation with a new medium.

In the final months of the exhibition’s making, the artist occupied multiple sites within the gallery’s double-volume warehouse, working across all canvases simultaneously. One area of the warehouse was dedicated to Mahoney’s preparatory paper studies. Gestured in minimal charcoal line, the figures were torn away, layered against their counterparts, and then reconstructed using masking tape. These hybrid bodies are haloed by visible fingerprints, bearing the trace of Mahoney’s earlier digital collage processes but are now re-grounded in the physical labour of the hand.

The resulting series unfolds as a speculative field of becoming. Bodies appear to assemble and disassemble, to press against their own corporeal limits, to bleed into one another in states that feel both mythic and earth-bound. Mahoney’s figures operate as propositions, charged sites in which form remains contingent and continually in flux. Broadly informed by Jungian paradigms, post humanist thought, and critiques of anthropocentrism, Mahoney rejects the idea of the human as epistemic centre. Mahoney’s figures do not assert dominance over their environments; they are co-formed by them, collapsing hierarchical distinctions between human and non-human, animal, plant, and organism.

‘Pareidolia’ names a perceptual phenomenon: the cognitive tendency to discern faces, figures, or patterns where none ostensibly exist. For Mahoney, it operates as both method and metaphor. Figures emerge from painterly, dual-toned planes in which sky and earth act as emotional and elemental registers rather than landscape. Mahoney has refined a materially attentive language of her own, whereby colour is built slowly through layered priming, cross-hatching and dripping. Out of these fields, bodies coalesce, limbs morph into tendrils, torsos open into cloud-like negative space.

Many of the canvases stage the intermingling of two bodies, invoking creation narratives in which worlds are born through the rupture and intimacy between primordial forces. In Sapientia (The Feminine Aspect of Wisdom), the diptych widens this field of vision to include multiple figures. Two smaller bodies perch beneath the outstretched arms of a presiding archetype. Set against a luminous field of brushstrokes, the tableau takes on a hallowed quality, echoing the canonised image of Madonna and Child.

Mahoney’s nude, gender-ambiguous forms are animated by a Queer refusal: a resistance to fixity, categorisation, and the fantasy of the autonomous subject. Masculinity and femininity circulate as energies rather than identities, felt erotic states that move through bodies irrespective of physical sex. The erotic is employed not as spectacle, but as connective tissue; a divine thread of Eros understood as relational vitality that binds disparate strains of existence. Culture is approached not as a bounded system but as a web of relations in which free exchange generates new forms of being rather than reinforcing difference.

Pareidolia moves toward a softening: an embrace of permeability, of edges breached. In refusing singularity and human exceptionalism, Mahoney opens a reciprocal space for renegotiating what it might mean to be human.

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