Banele Khoza's art will be zipping through Jozi traffic

Banele Khoza's art will soon be weaving through Joburg traffic. As the winner of the SA Taxi Art Award his decal designs, inspired by an artwork, will be on taxis.

It's fitting he should win this award, for a number of reasons, many of which are tied to the Lizamore & Associates gallery where the finalists for this award are on display. It's here that Khoza showed his recent exhibition, Lonely Nights, the conclusion of a year-long mentorship under Colbert Mashile.

Apart from the year-long Johannes Stegmann mentorship award Khoza enjoyed - pioneered by Teresa Lizamore - there's a shorter scheme dubbed the Thami Mnyele Mentorship award and last year the gallery set up a curating mentorship initiative. Lizamore is dedicated to developing artistic talent. Khoza's bold exhibition and winning entry for the SA Taxi Art Award is surely a testament to the value of mentorship schemes for young artists.

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Khoza has arrived at an interesting language; he renders faces and bodies in expressive gestural ways that deny details or fixed definitions. Words too play an important role. Handwritten scrawls pepper his paintings and the design for the taxis, in which he addresses the ambiguity of what it means to "be African".

In Lonely Nights he dealt with more personal quandaries, such as the anxieties of dating in the digital era when the line between sharing and oversharing has become blurred - "I think I scared him away" reads a line. In this exhibition Khoza plugged into base emotions driving humans; envy, jealousy, desire.

The Crying in Public series best encapsulates his fascination for sharing personal expression in the public realm - and its function in art. In some works it appears as if the artist's tears have coalesced with the paint, causing the image to distort.

• The SA Taxi Art Award exhibition is on show at the Lizamore Gallery until April 29.

• This is a sponsored article: Corrigall is an art consultant (corrigall.org).

• This article was originally published in The Times.