Fanon Painted Pink: Mpho Feni and the Visual Grammar of the New Man
- Lantisana 'Lana' Mabena
- Apr 1
- 3 min read
Am I a guest, observer, or intruder in this space? This is a question that I asked myself when I encountered Reading Time (Feni, c.2024) at the 2025 Woordfees. As I stood before the blue figure reclining in a state of domestic stillness, I realized that Mpho Feni (b. 1995) was not merely painting a scene of literacy, but the psychological tension lies in the shift from surveillance to witnessing.
Feni’s palette operates as a materialist protest, rejecting the notion that the body is fixed and incapable of change. Instead, this nudges the viewer to shift from Western frameworks of colour theory to utilise the African ontology of colour, one grounded in fluidity, relations, and becoming, as seen in Reading Time (Feni, c.2024).
The open doorway and the skewed perspective that Feni uses reminded me of Marlene Dumas' Peeping Tom, positioning the viewer as an intrusive onlooker. This perspective seems to place the viewer in a position of power. This framing initiates questions of voyeurism. The paintings, Self Portrait with Necklace of Thorns and Hummingbird (c.1940) by Frida Kahlo, on the pillow, and on the top left-hand side of the wall, A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self (c.1980) by Kerry James Marshall, further complicate this as they introduce layered reflections on selfhood, visibility, and surveillance.
However, unlike Marlene Dumas’ take on the Peeping Tom, Feni protects his subjects’ interiority through the subjects’ skin colour. Feni renders the subject in saturated blue tones, flattening depth and softening contour, so that the body resists stable definition provided by Western frameworks. The blue subject appears in a state of rawness, the act of laying bare, thus resisting the demand to perform identity for an external gaze.
Similar to Kahlo’s radical exposure, the subject finds a quiet power in setting the terms of the encounter. The positioning of Marshall’s painting stood out to me as it mimics the tilt of a mirror, recalling the viewer’s inherent hesitation, a psychological friction born of the 'taboo' gaze. For a split second, the viewer is confronted with their own reflection. While the viewer is caught in this specular trap, the psychological interior of the subject remains safely and intentionally veiled in the shadows.
Feni continues this decolonial act by painting his subjects with various shades of pink, as seen in AMAGODUKA (THOSE WHO ARE RETURNING HOME) (Feni, c.2026). A technique that forces the viewer to move past the colonial habit of immediately categorising a subject by their race. A decolonial act of “universality”. One of the rare instances in which the Western gaze suspends what David Batchelor terms “chromophobia” (Batchelor, 2000:22-23).
The pink subjects shatter the epidermal schema that Frantz Fanon mentions, where a black person is a black person first and never just a person. The pink “mask” hinders the viewer from racially categorising the subject. Rather, Feni’s refusal to let epidermis be the boundary of the character’s identity forces the viewer to look at the form and emotion present. These subjects become a visual manifestation of Fanon’s “New Man” that he describes in Black Skin, White Masks (1986)—the post-racial, humanistic future where black people are defined by the softness of their present —the everyday.
The shifting “masks” in Feni’s work preserve a sense of sovereign intimacy. As viewers, we are asked to abandon the extractive gaze and adopt something more attentive, more vulnerable. The question is no longer “What does this mean?” but rather: “How does it feel to look, and to be implicated in that looking?”
Sources consulted:
Batchelor. D. 2000. Chromophobia, London: Reaktion, pp. 22-23.
Fanon, F. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C. L. Markmann. London: Pluto Press.
Worldart. Mpho Feni. 2026.
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