For Messengers, Paul Wallington returned to Knysna, where he went to school, after more than three years studying abroad. He spent April and May 2026 painting in the area, revisiting roads, landscapes and details connected to his childhood on the Garden Route.
The return was shaped by a change in circumstance. Wallington’s family had sold the Plettenberg Bay home where he grew up, leaving him to encounter the area as a visitor rather than someone returning home.
That shift runs through the paintings. Familiar roads between Plettenberg Bay and Knysna, flowers remembered from childhood and the temporary architecture of sandcastles become fragments through which the past is approached rather than reconstructed.
Among them appear Wallington’s “messengers”: recurring figures and symbols that move between memory and the present. Bats enter dark spaces; suited men stand with their backs turned or occupy open landscapes; empty chairs suggest departure without explaining who has gone.
These elements give the paintings a sense of absence without turning them into straightforward narratives. Places remain recognisable, but their meaning has changed. What was once ordinary becomes charged by distance, memory and the knowledge that returning does not necessarily restore what was there before.
Messengers is less about recovering a childhood landscape than about recognising how it changes once it belongs partly to memory.
Born in 1993, Wallington is a Cape Town-based painter. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2019, where he was co-awarded the Simon Gerson Award for Outstanding Body of Work, before continuing his studies in Hamburg, Germany.
Images courtesy of Knysna Fine Art and Paul Wallington.
Exhibition Details
Paul Wallington | Messengers
Knysna Fine Art
Exhibition dates
26 September – 25 October 2026
Opening reception
26 September 2026 at 11:00
