The Zafer Style - What is Zafer? The Philosophy and Origins
- Pascal Lagesse
- 5 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
What is Zafer ? The Philosophy and Origins ? The word "Zafer" comes from Mauritian Creole, where it is used the way English speakers use "thing" or "stuff": a catch-all for something you can't quite name. When I found myself unable to classify my new style of painting, the word felt right. I called it Zafer, and the name stayed.
I began painting in 1986, already deeply in love with classical landscape work. Painters like Maurice Ménardeau, Max Boullé and Roger Charoux were my heroes, and under their influence, I started working in oils. I am entirely self-taught and never had the privilege of formal Fine Art studies. Everything I learned came from looking at other artists' paintings, often from very close up, and from slowly, stubbornly making progress with my own work. Many young artists today regard landscape painters as anachronisms. Mauritian contemporary art leans strongly toward abstraction, and the landscape painter has become a rare and ageing figure. I have often asked myself whether I should have followed a more modern path. But I came to understand that my happiness runs through Zafer's style of painting, and it was simply not possible to go against that.
When I created the Zafer style in 2003, I was looking for a different approach to landscape: one that kept the door open to classical painting while finding something genuinely new. Three artists, from very different worlds and very different moments in history, shaped what that something turned out to be.
The first was Vincent Van Gogh. His work overwhelmed me from the start, and one detail in particular caught my attention: his brushstrokes often took on geometric forms. The spirals and circular rhythms in The Starry Night, the near-geometric energy of Flowering Meadow with Trees and Dandelions, these paintings planted a question in my mind. What would happen if those brushstrokes were simplified to their absolute essence? What would a painting built entirely from clear, deliberate graphic shapes look like? That question became the seed of the Zafer style.
Beyond the visual, I was equally struck by Van Gogh's tenacity. He fought his whole life against his own doubts and the scepticism of fellow painters to prove that his work reflected the world as he truly saw it. He refused to paint the world as others expected. That kind of resolve resonated deeply with me, and it became something of a guiding principle: paint what you see inside, not what the world tells you to see.
The second influence came from the other side of the planet. When I first encountered Aboriginal Australian art, something in it stopped me. The dots, the patterns, the extraordinary density of visual information, and beneath all of that, an unwavering truth to self that I had rarely seen expressed so powerfully in any art form. These were not decorative images. They were entire civilisations held within a single painting. The traditions, the knowledge, the relationship to land, the stories passed from generation to generation: all of it encoded in patterns of dots and marks that had been refined over tens of thousands of years.
What moved me most was its absolute authenticity. Aboriginal artists did not paint for galleries or critics. They painted because it was who they were. The image was inseparable from identity, from belonging, from a way of seeing the world that needed no justification to anyone. I found that profoundly liberating. Here was proof that a painter could build an entire visual language from simple, repeating graphic elements: dots, lines, patterns, and produce work of overwhelming depth and meaning. It confirmed something I was beginning to feel my way toward: that the geometric and the graphic need not be cold or intellectual. They could carry warmth, memory, and an entire way of being in the world.
The third voice was Friedrich Hundertwasser. The Austrian painter and visionary architect painted a world that seemed to operate by its own laws: a world of spirals and organic curves, of colours that had no interest in being realistic and every interest in being alive. Hundertwasser rejected the straight line as something hostile to human nature. He embraced irregularity, asymmetry, and the kind of joyful visual chaos that makes a painting feel like it is breathing. His work was graphic in the deepest sense, with the boldness of illustration and the ambition of fine art, and yet it was also profoundly close to nature. Not nature as a backdrop or a subject, but nature as a living principle that ran through the composition itself.
His use of colour was unlike anything I had seen. Surfaces that another painter would have left neutral became events. A wall, a sky, a hillside: Hundertwasser treated each one as an opportunity for chromatic invention. His paintings did not describe a world so much as propose one. Here is what things could look like if colour were allowed to be fully itself. That idea went straight into the Zafer style. It gave me permission to move colour away from the merely descriptive and toward the expressive and the invented. A sky in a Zafer painting does not need to be blue. A tree does not need to be green. What matters is that the colour carries feeling and contributes to the world the painting is trying to build.
These three influences: Van Gogh's geometric energy, the pattern-making and authenticity of Aboriginal art, and Hundertwasser's graphic exuberance and chromatic freedom, converged into a style I could not have planned in advance. The Zafer emerged from them the way a landscape emerges from the weather: gradually, through exposure, through being shaped by forces larger than yourself.
The Zafers should not be read as straightforward interpretations of nature, nor as the product of an altered state of mind. They are, at their core, a call for beauty. Each one is a graphic interpretation of a luminous, colourful, simplified world: the opposite of how the world often presents itself. Here, the world looks the way I would have wanted it to look. There is an innocent naivety running through these paintings, perhaps the vision of someone reluctant to grow up entirely. This celebration of colour and joy is, in its quiet way, a protest against the dullness and ugliness that surrounds us.
Perspective has always been part of this. When I created the Zafer style, one of my intentions was to keep the door open to classical landscape painting by including a sense of real or deliberately distorted perspective. It gives the viewer a way to travel through the painting, into the distance, through layers of space. A flat surface that contains depth becomes a window. Once a painter masters perspective, it stops being a constraint and becomes a tool: a way of guiding the eye, of making the journey through the canvas feel real even when everything else in the painting is invented.
What the Zafer style ultimately proposes is a different kind of realism: not the realism of accurate observation, but the realism of feeling. The world I paint is made of circles, spirals, triangles and dots. Its skies come in colours you will not find on any particular afternoon. Its chickens may be striped, dotted, or cross-hatched into something that resembles a textile as much as a bird. And yet viewers recognise it. They know immediately that what they are looking at is Mauritius: its light, its vegetation, its particular quality of life beside the sea. The graphic simplification does not distance the painting from the truth. In the best cases, it brings it closer.
That, perhaps, is what I learned most deeply from Aboriginal art: that truth in painting is not a question of likeness. It is a question of integrity. You do not need to reproduce the world faithfully to tell the truth about it. You need to paint from a place that is genuinely yours, with a visual language that belongs to you, in service of something you actually believe. The Aboriginal painters taught me that a dot is not just a dot. It is a decision, a statement, a mark of belonging. Every element in a Zafer painting: every circle, every spiral, every triangle, is there for a reason. Together, they add up to a world.
My world. The way I would have painted it, if I had been given the choice.
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