PAIN CONFIGURATION: SACRIFICIAL GOD / STUDY OF A BULL II (2023)
This work was born in mourning — a visual elegy composed after the passing of my uncle. In his honour, I took on his name, completing the pseudonym Diablo Santana — an act of personal mythology, binding grief to legacy. This piece became a portal through which I processed that rupture, not just as personal loss, but as a meditation on sacrifice, ancestry, and the existential costs of being.
At the center of the work is a figure suspended in flux: a cow whose body holds contradictions. The animal begins as a Brahman bull — its neck broad, its forehead noble — and tapers into the form of a pregnant cow. It is neither and both. Masculine and feminine collapse into one ambiguous vessel. This duality is not biological, but symbolic: the animal as a cipher for human life itself — for the totality of existence, with its contradictions, pains, and passages.
The Brahman bull was chosen deliberately. In Botswana — a land shaped by cattle — this animal is prized for its endurance and resilience. It withstands the climate, resists harsh terrain, and thrives where others falter. It is not only a marvel of adaptation, but a creature of deep cultural significance for Southern African Bantu people — including the Tswana and Jona. It is central in life’s defining ceremonies: offered during marriages to bind families together, and slaughtered at funerals to accompany the dead. In both joy and sorrow, the cow is the medium through which we express communion, continuity, and closure.
In pre-colonial times, the cow held a status far beyond sustenance. It was not an animal to be consumed casually, nor one to be slaughtered for mere appetite. Instead, it was a store of value — a living currency — kept within the corral as a symbol of power, wealth, and life itself. To possess cattle was to possess time, lineage, and legacy. A man’s worth was measured not in coin, but in the quiet power of the herd behind his gate.
In those days, when the village required meat to feast, it was not the cow that was sacrificed. Instead, hunters would be summoned — bowmen, trackers, warriors — tasked with moving silently through bushveld and thorn, seeking antelope, wildebeest, kudu. The cow was not touched. It was preserved, reserved for the sacred: for ritual, for passage, for moments when life and death met face to face. It was the animal of ancestors, the animal of union and farewell — a spiritual vessel, not a common meal.
This historical reverence lingers still, folded deep within the image of the animal in this painting. It is not merely a creature. It is a monument to memory. A witness. A relic of pre-colonial logic, where value was held in life, not just in death.
The title Sacrificial God draws on a Setswana phrase: Modimo o nka e metsi — "the wet-nosed god." In this, the cow becomes divine, not through omnipotence, but through service, through sacrifice. It dies so that others may live, and in death, it unites the spiritual and the earthly.
In the image, the animal hovers between life and death, its body rendered without limbs — a gesture toward its utter helplessness, its absolute submission to fate. The paint bleeds downward in long, unrelenting drips — black, red, and crimson — echoing tears, blood, and rain. These drips are not decoration; they are grief made physical. They speak of anguish, frustration, helplessness, and rage. They weep for what has been lost and scream for what remains. The animal is a body undone, weeping not just for itself, but for what it represents — the violence of being, the inevitability of loss, the dignity in sacrifice.
This is abstraction as lament. A violent, expressive configuration of pain. The image writhes with subliminal form but refuses clean representation — because grief itself cannot be neatly rendered. It distorts. It contorts. It dissolves boundaries. In this way, Pain Configuration stands as a statement on the autonomy of the Black African painter. It resists being boxed, explained, or domesticated. It is not an illustration. It is a rupture. A wound.
Pain Configuration: Sacrificial God / Study of a Bull II is a hymn of submission and survival. A visual rite that echoes ancestral logic — of sacrifice, kinship, reverence, and spirit. It does not seek to explain pain. It marks it. Holds it. Bleeds with it. And in doing so, insists that there is something sacred in carrying what we cannot escape.
