This will answer one of the questions posed to high school students who passed the baccalaureate philosophy test: do artistic practices transform the world? Mbongeni Buthelezi, a 56-year-old South African visual artist, intends to demonstrate that yes. For 35 years, he has been painting portraits with the plastic waste that invades our daily lives. He collects them from the landfills of his city, in Johannesburg, then he cuts them into very small pieces, sorts them by color, then sticks them on canvas and this gives huge portraits, of women, children, faces who made him known all over the planet.
His works have been exhibited from New York to Prague via Amsterdam, Cairo and even Sydney. A journey that he retraces in a long interview with the CNN channel where he explains that he became interested in plastic simply because he could not afford oil paint. “It was in the late 1980she said. At school, we were taught to make collages with old magazines, so I looked for another material, another technique, and in an illegal dump next to the school, I saw all these colors, all these materials available and I thought ‘couldn’t I do something that gives meaning to all this plastic?’“
Bags, bottles and blue, green, pink, purple packaging… Mbongeni Buthelezi therefore began by melting them, with a hot iron, to make a paste to apply on the canvas. And then he added the collages to create his style and define the meaning he was looking for. “As an artist, I have to be the mirror of society, I’m supposed to reflect what’s going on, what’s there, on the ground, and what’s there, well it’s plastic“, he details.
A hot topic, since the OECD has just warned that the global production of plastic waste is expected to triple within 60 years, to reach 1.2 billion tonnes annually. That’s a lot of works of art. “Yet my greatest wishconcludes Mbongeni Buthelezi, it would be to run out of material, out of plastic. And that’s what I’m fighting for.“