Sometimes It Rains in the Karoo
Four South African artists, two artists from Europe (France and Portugal), one desert.

Cape Town-based painter, Wonder, arrived in the Karoo and found what so many find here — space, silence, and a sky that refuses to end. His canvases respond to that encounter: abstract and expressionist, they map the isolation of objects left behind in a vast landscape, colours shifting as the Karoo light shifts, the aloneness of things both used and forgotten. Wonder has exhibited across South Africa and in Germany, and his work has a way of pulling you in before you’ve quite decided to look.

Sonia Martins Mateus comes from further away — a Portuguese family displaced, a village in Beira Baixa, a practice rooted in territory, memory and what remains after things move or burn. Her visual language is arid and scorched, her palette ochre, ash and off-white. She works with fire, acid and bleach, attacking material to reveal what lies beneath. Her second return to the Karoo in 2026 — this time to the Great Karoo — continues a body of research into landscape, displacement and the slow transformation of inhabited spaces.

Together with the On the Way to Merweville show at the Prince Albert Gallery, these two shows ask the same question from opposite directions: what does a place do to the people who come to it? And what do people leave behind?
Then, these two artists decided to invite their colleagues, Liza Grobler, Seretse Moletsane, Cendres Delort and Swain Hoogervost to share this exhibition so as to extend the conversation. Through an outdoor photographic installation and an indoor exhibition, Southern Cross Gallery presents Sometimes, It Rains in the Karoo as an extension of their reflections and musings regarding the Great Karoo region. Paintings, photographs, and sculptures resonate with those precious moments of rain, so rare in this desert. Water and its preciousness thus evoke an almost contradictory imagery: a rainy landscape on these arid lands. The characteristics of water punctuate the cracks in the earth and awaken its textures and colors on a land that was once covered by the ocean during the Ice Age.

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In resonance, Discorde, a sound piece by Megabasse, a musician artist from
Belgium, will be played during the opening—a sound characterized by its repeating motifs that stretch our sense of space and time.
This artistic project, research and production are supported by Région Normandie, D.R.A.C. Normandie, RN13BIS (Fr).

Sonia Martins Mateus photographs printed at Michèle Gottstein Studio (Normandy,Fr).

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