Mbare Opera: Wycliffe Mundopa

Mundopa’s rhapsodic paintings are populated with an ensemble of women and children. Multiple bodies are presented within immense canvases of Fauvist colour. Dressed in carnivalesque attire – striped stockings, polka-dot dresses, farcical buckled heels – these figures occupy a Bacchanalian version of reality replete with the revelry, erotic agency and hedonism synonymous with Dionysian myth.

Mundopa renders Harare’s most vulnerable social factions – women and children – with a liberated hand. His use of non-objective form and lurid flashes of abstraction and absurdity disrupts our perception of these bodies, agitating the prejudices embedded in our ways of seeing. Within Mundopa’s practice, the personal and political coalesce. Behind the flux and vibrancy of our initial reading of his work, the politics of representation hums at the core.

Pathos and satire take center-stage in this body of work. Mundopa’s personages enter and exit the frame, each with their own characterisation, building densely layered storytelling that immerses us in a world both scintillating and disturbing. His pictorial language is laden with the symbolic use of animal imagery: crocodiles, life-size frogs, technicolour fish and dogs are all recurring characters. These do not function merely as visual devices, but as manifestations of colloquial expressions that are part of a vital urban sub-culture on Mbare’s streets. This vernacular encodes grassroots criticisms of the broader social ills and grievances of the country’s societal fabric.

The artist’s employment of the human form suggests an amplified consciousness of the body as a corporeal instrument for pain, rest, expression and desire. For his subjects, the experience of pleasure becomes a ritual act of defiance. These figures assert claim to gratification, indulging in all the earthly delights canonically associated with the painting traditions of the West.

In System and Dialectics of Art, John Graham proposed, “The purpose of art in general is to reveal the truth and to reveal the given object or event; to establish a link between humanity and the unknown; to create new values; to put humanity face to face with a new event, a new marvel.” The essential role of the artist lies in this process of metabolising, distilling, abstracting and magnifying the vast experience of the world around them.

Mundopa’s paintings hold a mirror to the unravelling of contemporary Zimbabwean life and the wider disarray and moral relativism of our post-capitalist era. He makes no judgement of this debasement. Within his liberated tableaux, there is a sustained joy and affirmation of both humankind’s fragility and resilient changeability.

Art is not a space for linearity and didactics. Mundopa creates a realm where agency is afforded to all those involved: himself as the artist, his subjects and his audience – whoever they may be.