The Gravity of a Dream is a new series of paintings by London based, South African born Zach Zono that express both a consolidation and an awakening. Opening outwards, these works feel more spacious and atmospheric, almost three-dimensional. “I felt more mature, freer, and my practice more developed. I had seen more of the world - that all comes back into the paintings.” This sense of expansion is immediately legible. Where earlier works were densely compacted with marks and layers, in response to the compressed energy of London, these paintings seem to exhale. Colour and form gather and towards the edges of the canvas, suggesting landscapes or portals into the wide-open vistas and lucid tones of sub-Saharan Africa, somehow filtered through the grit and clash of city lights. The result is a body of work that offers access points rather than closure: moments where energy condenses and releases, like a pulse or a beating heart.
Central to this step change was Zono’s decision to lean into the physicality of the studio and trust the intelligence of process. He describes spending time with the gravity of painting itself - pulling paint across the surface, moving canvases from wall to floor, allowing materials to behave according to their own weight and momentum. “Through that process, the paint started to form its own marks.” In learning to keep pace with this instinctive rhythm, he found a new freedom and flow. If paint will fall, gravity can hold it; his role is to guide rather than control. “I really let the painting have its own identity with the actual gravity and the way the paint was getting pulled across.”
This shift can be attributed to a form of listening, inspired by Willem de Kooning’s quote: The older I got, the more I tried to respect the first mark. Adhering to this essential schematic, marks that might once have been corrected or concealed are now left exposed, absorbed into the painting’s internal logic. “Not to cover up any marks that could be mistakes, and just let them be.” This acceptance signals the close of a ten-year cycle of painting and mark-making, and belies a confidence in his own lexicon. The spray-paint technique Zono developed (a diluted oil paint that moves fluidly across the surface) demands a degree of surrender. The paint falls where it wants to fall, creating new openings and moments of unpredictability. Traces of earlier signatures remain visible, whilst elevated by a surrounding lightness. “I feel I’ve achieved something that wasn’t there before.”
Often described as self-taught, Zono more accurately understands himself as an autodidact: shaped by peers, mentors, chosen places, and relentless curiosity rather than formal instruction. “Routine, discipline and repetition - practice, practice, practice - that process was my education.” This dedication is manifest in his superlative use of colour. “Colour is my favourite thing. Often my goal is to find offbeat colours that shouldn’t be seen together.” Warmer tones are used counterintuitively, opening the work to emotional rather than representational readings. “You might not know what the marks represent, you just feel what you want to feel.”
The paintings in this exhibition are made in relation to one another. Zono works across multiple canvases simultaneously, allowing each series to evolve like an ecosystem. “I never want one painting to finish before the others - they evolve together, like a family.” Oil paint’s slow drying time facilitates this approach, enabling colours to be pushed, scraped back, or revived days later. A mint green may eventually surface as red, its earlier state still faintly visible beneath. “The traces remain so you can see the path it’s taken. That’s beautiful to me.” Some works arrive quickly, almost fully formed within days; others sit in the studio for months, asking only to be seen. “Sometimes just feeling the painting, and looking at it, is part of painting the painting.”
This sensitivity to balance brings us to the exhibition’s title. “Without gravity, there is no way you can manipulate the medium.” Gravity is both a physical force and a metaphorical one; the pull that allows paint to move, settle, and hold, and the weight that gives the work its presence. In The Gravity of a Dream, Zono negotiates this tension at a new scale, and gives voice to the practice that anchored his dreams. Through a repertoire of gestures barely guided or sharply decisive, loose yet restrained, he evokes both the openness of his South African childhood and the dense tempo of London life. “I think the paintings are me moving through those spaces and trying to find a balance between them.”
Painting, for Zono, is a choreography of materials, body, instinct, memory, and time. Stretching, scraping, turning the canvas, stepping into and away from the surface becomes almost performative; the pulse of making is as vital as the image itself. His poetic titles reflect this sensibility. Drawing on the cadence of language he hears when returning home (see you soon soon, now now) each title acts as a key, attuning the viewer to repetition, rhythm, and accumulated meaning.
Only scale, he suggests, places limits on painting. He is drawn to conceive works larger than himself; form is found in reaching, stretching, even throwing paint. Within the confines of his London studio, scale becomes a measure of courage and commitment. “The painting becomes a kind of timestamp of what I have experienced, but also a reflection of the moment we live in.” That reach mirrors his own trajectory, arriving in London’s art world with conviction and curiosity, and learning, over time, to let gravity do its quiet work. “With every painting I’m learning how to let go a little more. It’s like chasing gravity; you can’t see it, but you feel it in everything.”
Nico Kos Earle
In conversation with Zach Zono
January, 2026