There are artists who depict cities, and then there are artists who seem to hold them as continuous, living systems. Titus Matiyane belongs firmly to the latter.

From Waterfall to Soweto stretches, folds, and accumulates across space, drawing Gauteng, Johannesburg, Soweto and beyond into a single unfolding field. Roads, buildings, railways and memory coexist without hierarchy, as if the city has been gently pressed flat, but never simplified.

“I’m using the alien view,” says Titus Matiyane, and the phrase becomes a kind of entry point into the work. It is not a view from above that flattens, but one that gathers. A way of seeing that holds entire regions in a single, continuous sweep.

Born in Atteridgeville in 1964, Matiyane began by drawing the environment around him. Those early works already contained the logic that continues to define his practice: place is never isolated. It always extends beyond what is immediately visible. In the studio, the process is deliberate and accumulative. He builds each city layer by layer, using pen, pencil, rulers, maps and atlases.

Streets are traced first, followed by structures, and gradually, entire urban systems emerge. What results is not a simplified map, but a dense visual field where infrastructure, architecture and lived environment sit together in extreme detail. Scale is central to the work. A ten-metre drawing can take a month. Larger works take significantly longer.

“I’m working the whole day,” he says, describing the rhythm behind the vast panoramas.”

In this process, sound is part of this rhythm. For Matiyane, music shifts according to geography: older South African recordings accompany local scenes, while international works are matched with rock, R&B or other genres. Music does not decorate the process. It anchors it, setting the pace and atmosphere.

The strongest response the work provokes is recognition. Viewers pick out their own streets, neighbourhoods and landmarks inside the dense mapped surfaces, as if the drawing is quietly giving the city back to them.

“This is my place. I’m staying here,” Matiyane says, describing how people respond when they see themselves reflected in the work.

At that moment, scale collapses. What was once vast cartography becomes immediate and personal. The city no longer feels distant on the page. It’s something the viewer has stepped into, not something they’re looking at from afar.

Matiyane has produced panoramic works of Africa from Cape to Cairo, the United States from coast to coast, and extensive mappings of the Middle East, Europe and Asia. In each case, entire regions are drawn into continuous visual systems where borders dissolve into adjacency.

The same method now extends into East Asia, where China, Japan, Korea and India are being drawn into vast interconnected systems of mountains, cities, coastlines and infrastructure. The world, in this practice, remains perpetually unfinished.

Alongside its scale, the work carries a quiet critique of recognition and value. Matiyane speaks openly about the conditions faced by artists in South Africa.

“The ministers, they didn’t care,” he says. “They care for the sport… many of our artists, they lose hope.”

Despite this, the practice continues to expand internationally, supported by exhibitions, collections and publications. His book Cities of the World, produced in Europe, reflects the scope of that reach, circulating his work across multiple cultural and institutional contexts.

“My intention is to promote art in South Africa to help all artists,” he says. The work becomes not only a personal archive, but a broader attempt to assert visibility and continuity for artistic practice itself.

What remains most striking is that nothing in Matiyane’s work resolves into final form. Each drawing is part of an ongoing system of mapping that refuses closure. Cities are not completed. They are extended.

“I can draw the place without visiting,” he says, “as long I understand geography.”

That understanding is active, not static. It is built through repetition, observation and accumulation, where geography becomes something lived rather than simply recorded.

In the end, the exhibition does not present cities as objects to be viewed. It presents them as environments to be entered, followed and traced. And in that shift, something subtle happens. The viewer stops looking at the city from the outside. They begin to move through it.

The exhibition was hosted in the Atrium at Keyes Art Mile.

Article by Phumelele Mbatha