Gagosian, London
Jokes, warnings, clues, allusions and signposts … the Botswana-born artist’s grand cycle is full of vitality and observation in an exhibition that’s close to a big, discursive novel

A young man, little more than a boy, hands draped superciliously over the sides of his chair and with one leg fastidiously crossed over the other, stares me down from behind his dark glasses. I’d ask him to stop staring but to either side of him stand two identikit bare-chested minders in low-slung jeans and flip-flops. The hired muscle doesn’t seem to like the look of me either. Behind them all hangs a cheesy picture of Jesus with the Sacred Heart and a photo of a guy – perhaps Dad? – in a military uniform. You just want to get out of there, or move on to the next painting in Meleko Mokgosi’s Bread, Butter, and Power, a 2018 cycle of 21 large painted panels, which abut one another in larger and smaller groupings, the largest of which fills the longest wall of the biggest gallery in Mokgosi’s first UK exhibition.

I could go on all day about this one group of paintings: a woman in a sumptuous if ugly salon, holding a paper in her hand – a letter, a bill, a poem, a shopping list, who knows? – and staring off into some self-absorbed distance. Uniformed schoolgirls dig a bit of parched earth, watched over by a man with several large dogs. A guy on a bed, fully clothed, resting after work, strong daylight filtered through a curtain; Mokgosi is very good at lassitude, solitude and introspection, and the sense of things impending. Soft shadows on the wall, a patterned pillow. The man looks back at us, as if we’ve walked in uninvited.