Why I Paint With Patterns — A visual language made of textures
- Pascal Lagesse
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Stripes, circles, triangles — a visual language made of textures
People have often asked why I use such dense patterns and textures throughout my paintings. The answer reflects how patterns express the essence of my artistic vision, and there are several reasons for this.
If you look at any of my paintings, you won't find much empty surface or plain backgrounds. The sky is never simply blue; it is often composed of concentric circles, dots, spirals, and triangles. In my world, a wall doesn't settle for being flat grey; it covers itself with small rectangles, stripes, and hatching. In the same vein, a tree's foliage becomes a network of yellow triangles on a green ground.
This approach is a deliberate choice that speaks to how I perceive the world and my country, Mauritius. Zafer style uses patterns to bring movement and life to still paintings, turning a flat canvas into a vibrant experience.
Pattern as Writing
In my painting, patterns work like words in a sentence. Horizontal stripes evoke calm, breadth, and the marine horizon. Concentric circles evoke radiating energy, sunlight, and sound waves. Sharp triangles introduce tension, a more nervous geometry. Zigzags tell of movement, dance, sugarcane swaying in the wind.
Each area of a painting receives its own vocabulary. I never decide in advance. It's always instinctive, almost musical. Like a musician improvising on scales he knows by heart, I compose with these elementary forms until the canvas sings.
Van Gogh: When the Brushstroke Becomes Texture
I am definitely not the first painter to have understood that the surface of a canvas can be a score. Vincent van Gogh, long before me, had discovered that the way paint is laid down, the direction and the density of brushstrokes, radically transform the meaning of what is being represented.
In The Starry Night (1889), Van Gogh's sky is not painted; it is woven. Swirls of blue and white curl in on themselves, creating a living, almost cosmic sky that pulses with an inner energy. The cypresses rise like black flames. Every mark is oriented, intentional, and together they create an emotional texture as much as a visual one.
Van Gogh does not paint what he sees; he paints what he feels. The brushstroke is an emotion made visible.
Where Van Gogh used the direction of his brushstrokes to express emotion, I use recurring geometric patterns to reveal the beauty and energy of my surroundings. Patterns transform flat color into a physical presence, capturing Mauritius's atmosphere.
The difference may perhaps be that Van Gogh paints from within himself outward toward the world, and I paint the outside world to transform the darkness within into color and joy.
Van Gogh hatches his wheat fields to show that the wind is a force. I fill my cane fields with interlocking patterns to show that the fields are a collective body in motion. In both cases, "texture" is not decorative; it is narrative. It says what color alone cannot say.
Aboriginal Painting: Patterns as the Memory of the World
I see a connection with Australian Aboriginal painting. When I first encountered these works on a calendar in my grandmother's bathroom, I sensed an immediate, almost physical recognition.
In Dreamtime art, patterns are not decorative. Concentric circles represent waterholes, sacred sites, and ancestral events. Wavy lines are rivers or pathways. Dots, countless and vibrating, weave a map of the land as much as a vision of the cosmos. Each motif is information, memory, or prayer.
For Aboriginal painters, the surface is never empty because the world is never empty. Every place is inhabited, every thing is connected.
Though I do not paint the Dreaming, I deeply believe that an empty canvas misses something essential about a place. Mauritius, like the Australian bush, is a world full of light, stories, and memory.
When I paint Le Morne and the mountain becomes an assembly of blue and violet marks, each oriented differently according to the rock's slope, I am doing something similar to the Aboriginal artist who covers his mountain with dots. I am saying: this place has a texture, a density, a history that a simple outline cannot interpret. In both cases, Dreamtime painting and my own, the pattern is a form of inner mapping. It is not "what it looks like," but "what it truly is." Aboriginal art encodes generations of knowledge about the land. My painting encodes a way of inhabiting my world, of feeling its weight, its heat, its cultural multiplicity. Pattern is our shared way of saying: this world is too rich to be rendered by simple imitation.
Patterns at the rescue
Patterns and shapes also have a therapeutic effect in my art. Repeating shapes brings a sense of calm and peace. Over the past 20 years, as I have embraced Zafer Style, these repetitive gestures have become a form of meditation.
Painting Mauritius Without Betraying It
Patterns are essential to capture Mauritius's complexity. The island is not a postcard, but a layered, multicultural space with simultaneous tensions and beauties that patterns help reveal.
To paint all of this with smooth, flat surfaces would not be enough. It would reduce complexity to a consumable image. So I fill the spaces. I weave. I build surfaces that, like the reality of the island, are never exhausted at first glance.
The longer you look at one of my paintings, the more you discover. A stripe that becomes a zigzag. A circle that contains a triangle. A triangle that repeats itself as an echo in both the sky and the sea. This is what Mauritius has been doing to me for years: revealing itself in layers, in details, in perpetual surprises.
Van Gogh, Aboriginal painters, and I each use unique marks to recreate the world. Patterns are more than imitation—they are the painter's language for expressing a place's richness and depth.
Patterns are my alphabet. Mauritius is my sentence. The canvas is the page.
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