Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Ravelle Pillay’s American debut with Sanctum (The Light and the Shade), the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location.
The exhibition features a new series of paintings that respond to Pillay’s 2024 trip to Réunion Island, offering a layered exploration of the island's complex colonial history and its enduring influence on the landscape and its people. Through her work, Pillay examines themes of cultural hybridity, resilience and the ways landscapes bear witness to history.
Located in the Indian Ocean between Mauritius and Madagascar, Réunion Island is presently an overseas department of France with a cultural heritage shaped by African, Indian, Chinese and French influences. Pillay’s paintings respond to the complexities of pre- and colonial history; its postcolonial present and creole culture. Her work confronts the lingering presence of plantation society—its brutality and its enduring impact on contemporary life, agriculture and the island’s historical and present-day economy and politics.
The island’s striking topography—dense, verdant plains, volcanic plateaus and misty mountain villages - becomes both a literal and symbolic backdrop in her exploration of identity and resistance. Pillay reflects on the historical significance of sanctuaries accessible only by helicopter or foot, along treacherous cliffside paths first forged by the Maroons, enslaved people who escaped captivity. These landscapes of refuge, marked by painted shrines and Madonnas, attest to distinct threads linking African people, enslaved by the French creole elite; enslaved and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers and the long reach of British colonial power.
Artworks
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Installation Views
Central to Sanctum (The Light and the Shade) is the Reunionese legend of Mario, an enslaved man who escaped his captor’s plantation in the parish of Sainte-Marie. With his pursuers close behind and his capture seeming inevitable, Mario pulled out a small stone effigy he had carved of a Black Madonna, set her on a rock and began to pray for salvation. According to local legend, as the slave catchers were about to descend on him, a dense, impenetrable copse of sharp bougainvillea sprang from the ground to protect him. A shrine to the Vierge Noire (Black Madonna) stands at the spot this miracle is said to have occurred. In opposition to the Black Virgin is the inverse—the white, ultramarine, marble and porcelain Virgin, a figure embedded in the plantations, fields, bed chambers and chapels.
In the large-scale painting Grove, Pillay portrays the Vierge Noire, shrouded by towering banana leaves that create a protective, maternal sanctuary. In Bounty (The After-Image), a figure is enveloped by vibrant magenta bougainvillea—its branches both sharp and protective, offering seclusion as much as they can cut and sting. An evergreen vanilla vine weaves through the composition, tracing its origins to Mexico before French colonists introduced it to La Réunion. It was there that Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, discovered the method of artificial pollination that enabled vanilla cultivation on the island—an innovation for which he was never compensated.
Through Sanctum (The Light and the Shade), Pillay creates a space for reflection on the enduring legacies of colonialism, the resilience held within cultural memory, and the narratives inscribed in the land itself. The histories, trade routes, and cross-pollinating influences of the Indian Ocean remain central to her thinking, alongside the lasting effects of colonial intervention and the seductive, yet deceptive, allure of tropical landscapes. Islands and coasts reappear and transform—mirroring fragmented, inverted images across the sea. In response, Pillay’s paintings act as both remembrance and resistance, amplifying voices that continue to reverberate through time.
Artist Bio
Ravelle Pillay (b.1993, Durban, South Africa) is a painter who considers the legacies of colonialism and migration, and how they haunt and reverberate in the present. She draws from found and family photographs, ephemera and oral history, as well as the material degradation of photographic images over time to consider the ways we construct our identities and the ways we remember.
Pillay’s first institutional show, Idyll, opened at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2023. This followed a residency at Gasworks London at the end of 2022.
Solo shows include Tide and Seed, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg. (2022), The Weight of a Nail, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2024) and Sanctum (the light and the shade), Goodman Gallery, New York (2025).
Select group exhibitions include Silence Calling from One Continent to Another, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg (2021), (Un)Natural : Constructed Environments at the Nasher Museum of Art (2023-2024), Soulscapes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London (2024) and Standing in the Gap, Goodman Gallery, London (2024).
Pillay was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in London, to create a body of work as part of the programme for Artists First: Contemporary Perspectives on Portraiture which opened in September 2025.
Pillay received a degree in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015 and was the first prize recipient of the 2022 African Art Galleries Association's Emerging Painting Invitational.
She lives and works in London.
