Repetition, Aboriginal Art, and the Soul of the Zafer Style

Aboriginal and Zafer painting

As I often said before, when I paint in my Zafer style, repetition naturally becomes part of the process. I often find myself tracing the same shapes and lines repeatedly, not only because I want to, but because it feels good. There is something deeply soothing about repeating forms. It is like meditation with a brush in hand. The repetition helps me clear my thoughts and stay fully present in the moment. So, here is a story about repetition, Aboriginal Art, and the soul of the Zafer Style.

I am a self-taught Mauritian artist, and over more than twenty years of painting in this style, I have come to understand that the Zafer style is built on this simple, patient act. The word may be unfamiliar to people discovering my work for the first time, so let me explain it plainly. Zafer is the dense layering of shapes that covers my canvases: small circles, triangles, dots, and lines packed tightly together, held in place by bold black outlines and bright colour. From a distance, you see a dodo, a mountain, a grazing animal, or a traditional house. Up close, you discover that every surface is alive with shapes and lines. Each painting is really thousands of small decisions stacked one on top of another.

Why repetition feels like home

Each circle, triangle, dot or line adds energy to the painting. The repetition gives structure to the work. For me, it is not only about decorating the surface. The addition of shapes and lines also affects the artwork's colour values.

This is something people do not always expect. They assume the patterns are pure decoration, a kind of busy texture laid on at the end. The truth is the opposite. When I place a field of warm dots against a cooler background, the eye starts to mix them, and the whole area shifts in tone. A section that looked flat suddenly comes into motion. A sky can become deeper or lighter or warmer or colder. A mountain feels closer or further away depending on how I crowd or space the shapes. The repetition is not on top of the painting. It is the painting. It is how I build light, weight, and mood without ever reaching for a single smooth gradient.

There is also a rhythm to it that I cannot really separate from music or breathing. When I am deep in a passage of shapes, my hand finds a pace and keeps it. I am not counting. I am not planning ten marks ahead. I am simply present with the one mark I am making now, and then the next, and then the next. Hours pass in what feels like minutes. People talk about flow states. For me, the Zafer style is the most reliable way I know to fall into one.

Spinifex People: Art and stories from Pila Nguru exhibition - Western Australia Museum

A connection to Aboriginal art

This connection to repetition always reminds me of Aboriginal art. Their use of dots and patterns tells stories that go far beyond what we see. The repetition in Aboriginal art carries a spiritual feel, linking the artist to the land, to ancestors, and to community. When I paint with dots and lines, my mind flies out of Curepipe to the red sands of Australia.

I want to be honest and respectful about this connection, because it matters. I am Mauritian, not Aboriginal, and the dot paintings of the Australian desert belong to one of the world's oldest living cultures. The contemporary movement most people recognise, with its fields of fine dots, grew out of Papunya in the Central Australian Desert in the early 1970s, when a group of men began translating designs from sand, body, and ceremony onto board and canvas. The dotting was never only beautiful. In many works, it also veiled sacred knowledge, so that what was meant for the initiated stayed protected even as the painting travelled into the wider world. Those patterns hold the Dreaming, the law, the map of Country. They are not mine to claim.

What I can claim is the resonance I feel when I stand before that work. I recognise the patience. I recognise the trust that a single repeated mark, made thousands of times, can carry something far larger than itself. I recognise the idea that a surface of dots is not empty decoration but a way of holding meaning, memory, and place. When I cover my canvas with the small motifs of the Zafer style, I am telling Mauritian stories: the lagoon, the cane fields, the dodo that we lost, and the mountains that watch over our island. The vocabulary is completely different. The instinct beneath it feels related, and I am grateful to have been moved by Aboriginal art enough to look more closely at my own.

I think this is how influence is supposed to work between artists who will probably never meet. You see something true in another tradition. It wakes up something that was already sleeping in you. You do not copy the surface. You let it change the way you understand your own hands. The deserts of Australia are very far from the wetlands of Curepipe, and yet a Mauritian painter can feel a thread running between them.

Pascal Lagesse's Uluru - 2023

Repetition as a quiet therapy

There is also a very personal side to this repetition. It helps me through moments of depression. When I paint, I focus on one simple shape at a time, and that small act keeps my thoughts grounded. It is a colourful therapy that turns gloom into colours and shapes.

I do not say this lightly, and I am not pretending a brush can replace real care. But I know what the dark days feel like, when the mind races toward everything that hurts and nothing seems to hold still. On those days, the Zafer style gives me a place to stand. I do not have to solve anything. I do not have to feel better first. I only have to make one dot. Then another. The task is small enough that I can always manage it, and the repetition slowly gathers my scattered attention back into one place.

By the end of the afternoon, there is something in front of me that was not there before. A patch of bright pattern. A mountain coming to life. Proof that I kept going. The painting holds the evidence of all those small acts, and somehow that steadies me more than any pep talk ever could. The gloom does not always leave, but it must now share the room with colour, and that changes everything.

I think this is partly why my work tends toward bright skies, warm reds, and joyful subjects even when my own mood is heavy. The painting is not a diary of how I feel. It is the place I go to feel differently. The dodo with its slightly comic dignity, the goat on a roof, the pirogue under a pink sky: these are not just Mauritian images. They are my way of insisting that lightness is still possible.

Water underpainting

Bringing it back to Mauritius

For the many Mauritians living far from home, I hope the repetition in these paintings does some of its quiet work too. When you have been away for years, the island can start to feel like a blur of warm memory. My hope is that the dense, patterned surfaces give you something to settle into. A way back to the colours of a place you carry inside you. The same repetition that grounds me while I paint might, I like to think, ground a viewer who is missing the lagoon, the mountains, or the noise of a Tuesday market in Vacoas.

That is the strange gift of working this way. A practice that began as my own private meditation, my own colourful therapy, becomes a bridge. It connects me to a tradition on the other side of the Indian Ocean that I deeply admire. It connects me to my own difficult days and helps me move through them. And it connects me, mark by patient mark, to anyone who stands in front of the finished canvas and feels, even for a moment, carried somewhere else.

When people ask me what the Zafer style really is, I sometimes struggle to give a short answer. Now I think the honest reply is this. It is repetition turned into meaning. It is the small, soothing act of making one shape at a time, done again and again until a whole world appears. That is the heart of how I paint, and it is the reason I keep returning to my brushes, day after day, in my studio.