Stephen Garan’anga Visual Art
Upcoming self-taught visual artist, Kombo Chapfika’s current debut solo exhibition at home themed “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” at Njelele Art Station in Harare brings together tales of the contemporary world around him, extreme patience and dedication.

Kombo an economics graduate from the United States of America heavily dependent on computers for his various capabilities which include video production, animation, designing, graphics, painting to mention a few displays master dexterity abilities too when creating freehand thin stripped collages and pointillism like technique when drawing using various sized anticlockwise drawn circles.

His subjects vary from his recent past experiences both pleasant and unpleasant, adored icons and harsh realities in the country. Some of his featured artworks are on panels of wood, digital prints on canvas, pen and pencil drawings paper, a video installation, and have such titles as “Zvirikufaya”, “Transit”, “Julia MD”, “Odd Future”, “ZIMaze”, “Adventure Time”, “Bob vs. Warhol”, “Bob”, “The Business Woman”, “Laundry Day”, “Hail to Chief”, to highlight a few.

“ZIMaze” is a small sized digital print on canvas of the Zimbabwean map in linear black and white puzzle like a Pacman game where you have manoeuvre your path through the numerous twist and turns out to the other end.

You are shown the point of entry down at the southern most tip of the Zimbabwe-South African border. Surrounding the game map is pitch black with texts of various encounters within the country mostly of harsh realities which include power cuts, stolen phones, strange men, middle men, unfitting suits, spot fine, toll gate, Tt-boned by Du, snatched wallet, harassed by, out of airtime, nice weather etc. Of the texts he said some were his unfortunate experiences like ‘snatched wallet’ where he had his wallet snatched by a strange man he had given a lift and most of the things happen daily to many.

“The Business Woman” is a mixed media collage on panels of wood in which he stuck various bold newspaper headlines as a background before constructing an image of a modern day office woman speaking on her cell-phone whilst working on her laptop on the desk at the same time surrounded by various things awaiting her attention.

He stuck pieces of cloths of various designs and materials to carefully form the image of the working lady. On another collage he strenuously hand cuts innumerable thin strips of various magazines of colour before gluing each and every single of them on a fairly sized rectangular piece of wood panel to construct a piece of a lying lady titled “Julia MD”. He claimed that the beautiful lady used to make grown men behave like children to get her attention when he was still in the United States of America. During his recent art talk on the show he stressed that such pieces were gruelling to create and very difficult for him to put a price tag because of the labour intensity involved and be able to achieve exceptional results at the end of the day.

Kombo Chapfika repatriated not in a distant past after spending over a decade of study and work overseas. It struck him that “this is it, I’m now on my way home” whilst going through an African plane magazine to inspire him to create a painting titled “Transit”.

Whilst abroad he had also worked as a cartoonist as he had enjoyed drawing since childhood.

He has kept past sketch books full of drawings that he also incorporates in his work.

Chapfika says he enjoys his artworks very much as he discovers a lot of interesting effects on his own which would not have been the same if he had gone through an art school.

On the other side of his creativeness through wide use of computers and various latest software he produces amazing multimedia work.

On the show he had an interesting running Zimbabwean map animated character on his three dimensional sound responsive video installation that he said he may consider to develop to be an online game.

You Might Also Like

Comments

Take our Survey

We value your opinion! Take a moment to complete our survey