Since childhood, I have always had the unpleasant feeling of being born in the wrong century or on the wrong planet. I am crossing our twenty-first century, like a fish lost in a forest! This is reflected more and more in my painting where I try to reproduce on canvas the world in which I would have liked to live. My painting style allows me today to express the disconnection I feel with the state of the world and the blindness of its leaders.
I have been painting dodos (bird endemic to Mauritius) for several years now. However, it wasn't until 2023 that I started painting them in a human-free environment. This world that I create around this bird, which has disappeared since the end of the 17th century, is for me a way of denouncing the irreversible damage caused by humanity and the gradual change in Mauritius which has seen its state evolve from a “paradise on earth” to a country where the anarchic expansion of housing and the lack of ecological vision are leading it down a slippery slope.
Painting happiness is often seen as going against the images that society throws at us day after day through the press and social networks. The unhappiness of the world is a seller while the happiness of the world could seem futile.
The choice to illustrate the happiness of living, the beauty of the world is mine and it gives me enormous joy. My Zafer style is deliberately utopian, because it is important for me to create a counterpart to the bleakness of the world. I put all my heart into my paintings so that they could may be become vectors of happiness.
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