Delve into the art of making things disappear

For much of his career, Lehlogonolo Mashaba has been preoccupied with the way in which things are lost or disappear: particularly the fugitive nature of memory, and of meaning.

His depictions of human figures - blurry, shaded forms made up of overlaid lines of text - explore the ways in which the overlapping jumble of words constitutes us (our very forms and identities).

In his latest exhibition, AnAtomic II, there are print works and drawings (including some in which he has tentatively introduced colour), paper cut-out works, and new works in which he has used drawings on layers of Perspex, which he overlays to create three-dimensional images.

He's also included abstract works that look like aerial diagrams or landscape photographs. But these map-like representations also look like diagrams of cells or atoms. Some of his human figures are constituted of these patterns, too, suggesting a scientific approach to the body.

There is a long preoccupation in South African art with the representation of landscape and body. In particular, mapping and cartography have been used to explore the themes of history, memory and identity by the likes of William Kentridge, Willem Boshoff, Gerard Marx, Marcus Neustetter, and Chloe Reid.

In entering this thematic terrain, Mashaba's general thrust is more spiritual and mystical.

Some of the new works - at once map-like and like microscopic images of cells and molecules - have an early romantic character. The inversions of scale - the idea that a cell or an atom, looked at closely enough, resembles another universe - evokes William Blake's "world in a grain of sand".

Just as the meanings of words seem to have no centre, so the physical matter of the body seems to recede. Both text (Mashaba often uses snippets from the Bible) and scientific examination yield a silence at their centre. Mashaba's cell-like universes suggest a mystical unity at the centre of all things, the sense that everything is connected. This is also expressed through the metamorphosis of forms - words that are bodies, cells that are landscapes.

Mashaba's concern with the strange ease with which the centre of things can vanish - the meaning that has escaped the words, the lost memory, the sense that when you think you're getting to the solid atom, another universe opens up - evokes something of the delicacy or frailty of the life itself that animates the human form.

• 'AnAtomic II' is on at Lizamore & Associates, Johannesburg, lizamore.co.za until June 24