At the age of twenty Wallen Mapondera arrives at the hospital to see his ailing brother. Unbeknownst to the nurse on duty, the brother has died. When Mapondera arrives on the scene it is death he confronts. The memory remains, a suppurating sore, such is the hurt the young artist carries forward – the death of three siblings, his father, the throes of dying of his birthplace, Zimbabwe. For Mapondera cannot disentangle the personal from the political. Abjection and neglect have become systemic.

A witness to Mapondera’s astonishing exhibition at SMAC in Cape Town in February 2025 – during the Art Fair – this solemnity, or melancholy, was not evident. And yet, reading the interview with the artist in his beautiful catalogue, one could not ignore his precarious grasp of his birthplace as a wasteland – a place trapped in an urgent need for basic goods, the squalor of hunger. It is then that sloughed packaging, for economically practical and inspired reasons, becomes Mapondera’s resource and focus. But it is what the artist does with waste products – with the imaginary of a wasteland – that is truly astounding. Drapes and vortices shape the geography, the landscape, of his abstracted works. The colours are both sumptuous and subtle. The void – gutted circles in the body of a work, affirms the abyssal in an otherwise delicately attenuated landscape. It is an excruciating yet exquisite beauty that reigns, for Mapondera – despite deep personal grief, despite the horrors of a failed nation-state – gifts us transcendence. His is a wasteland – psychic and social – that has been transmogrified.

Here, Mapondera adds a caveat, that the ‘hunger’ that shaped him peaked between 2007 and 2009, the worst years in Zimbabwe’s recent history. Then, suffering was unsurprising and horrifyingly common place. However, if Mapondera remains what Franz Kafka termed the ‘Hunger Artist’, it is because his art is inextricably bonded to pain-need-dearth that must be reimagined, reinvented. In my estimation, no Southern African artist has rearticulated waste as commandingly, as potently, as brilliantly. Fragmented, stitched, ramified with a glue gun, his tapestries, drops, excrescences, allow for a nurturing bonding first and last. ‘A distinct outgrowth on a body or plant, resulting from disease or abnormality,’ an excrescence is an apt descriptor. The complex of beauty and psychic and social disease are harnessed, the artist’s deep sorrow sublimated in the process.

That Mapondera has now shifted back to the luxury of oil paint and canvas, a first love once difficult to acquire because of financial straits, means that the artist’s language has shifted. It is the variable texture of oil paint – thick, thin, glutinous, viscous – which assumes centre-stage. The core inner conversation, however, remains the same, for what Mapondera cannot elide – that which he chooses not to – remains human loss. Art as an existential experiment, a process of atonement, is the bass tone that thrums throughout his oeuvre. In a recent personal communication, Mapondera tells me that in his latest suite of paintings he seeks to position himself as ‘one with power’ – with ‘political power’, with ‘influence’, ‘imagining how it could feel to pause everyone’s time because of [his] presence. The roads clearing, passing tollgates without paying, that stuff done by people with power.’ This confession is instructive. No longer abject, no longer a victim snagged in the maw of personal and social pain, it is a transfigural role he assigns himself. To understand this imaginary projection is to understand an unwavering desire to conquer hurt. I tell him that his works have become figurative. A fusion of abstraction and figuration he replies of works in progress. In time the figures will dissolve into an abstracted rubric.

In a completed work in the series a commanding figure – a potentate – is encircled by his minions. He wears a white cravat which one associates with the higher echelons of the judiciary and church. His central protagonist’s body is coolly and comfortably splayed while his minions, barely present, serve as a hallucinatory homage to power. Unchecked power corrupts. However, as Michel Foucault reminds us, power is always fallible, despite its adamantine projection. Every sphere of society is complicit in the creation of power. ‘Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.’ In Mapondera’s case, the society is Zimbabwean. It is the situational nature of power that must be questioned – its vulnerability. By assuming power – a mock-assumption on the part of the artist – we are invited to a staged performance of its precarity. Adamantine forces are smothered-eroded-corroded. The governing drive towards abstraction keeps all self-aggrandising portraiture in check. For in the first and last instance, it is the more expansive and inclusive reach of abstraction that defines Mapondera’s art. The staggered runnels of paint give the painting its tenuous deliquescence. Liquefaction dominates. We have entered a realm which Zygmunt Baumann describes as a ‘liquid society’, ‘a chaotic, ever-changing world where social forms (jobs, relationships, communities) melt faster than new ones can be forged.’

Therefore, while Mapondera imagines being all-powerful, his gut expression, evident in the movement of paint and overriding drive toward abstraction, reminds us that dissolution trumps certainty. And if, psychologically, the artist seeks exemption, this search, finally, is delusory. His is a world mired for decades is a larger social death. That, despite grief, he has created a complex, pained, yet unutterably beautiful world, reveals the artist’s supreme quality. Wallen Mapondera’s latest suite of paintings, figurative yet abstract, in quiescent hues, assuredly return us to the artist’s defining crux – the deeply-held and saving realisation, after Ernest Heminway, that courage is grace under pressure.