In a statement elegaic and bleak, David Koloane signals two 'disparate communities' - commuters and stray dogs - as sources for works exhibited in 1996 at the London gallery Art First. We read: 'There is always some focus on street children but very little, if any, on street dogs. The dogs are exposed to even more hazards and abuses. Their existence is almost a minute to minute feat of survival. The dogs move around in packs like hyenas and can be just as vicious. They drift around waste dumps, garbage cans, wedding and funeral ceremonies. The commuters, on the other hand, leave their homes against a mist of brazier fire, smog and industrial emissions. They return at dusk under a blanket of dark and ominous layers which hover over the township so much that shape, and form become blurred.'

Thus we learn of hazard, primordial fires, of a soiled dawn and dusk, the relay between the township and the city that defines a mortal toil. This vision is captured in Twilight Haze. Therein no illumination exists which is not also betrayed. The viewer stands as though astride a dying light. This, it seems, is life: these glimmerings of a fraught traffic - human, vehicular, animal.

It is fitting, then, that the art critic lvor Powell should liken the art of Koloane to that of J. M. W. Turner. 'This is because Koloane's paintings from this period, like those of Turner, are generally built around a central point of light ... And in the same way that Turner used light as a cosmic metaphor for the dawn of empire, the glorious rising of the new order, so Koloane finds a peculiarly urban African kind of sensibity as translated through its light.'

Koloane's paintings are 'harder edged', however. 'His references are urban, his light is degraded, his consciousness tends towards the realist assertion.'

Powell's qualification is a sound one. For Koloane, it is the world, and not the light alone, that is degraded. There is no respite from the darkness he renders visible. Those plaintive yet ominous dogs; the avid, desperate and dwarfed transactions of the huddled crowd; the towering battery of skyscrapers that forms the horizon and limit of his paintings: all of these pronounce a crisis, an excess, a fact of living, of enduring, at once noble and dismal. And if Koloane has chosen to capture that which exists at the limit of a soiled dawn and dusk, then it is because the rest is insupportable.

Sue Williamson and Ashraf Jamal in Art in South Africa - the future present