In this conversation, artist David Ngaji speaks with Lindokuhle Nkosi about the philosophical and narrative scaffolding behind his most recent body of work, The Tale of Patrick the Terrible. Drawing on classical myth, religious allegory, and Aristotelian metaphysics, Ngaji reflects on what it means to create new myths out of the fragments of old ones and why he chose an unlikely figure, Patrick Star from SpongeBob SquarePants, as his tragic hero. With disarming honesty and sharp intellect, he explores themes of suffering, inherited meaning, and the limits of knowledge, arguing that foolishness may be closer to truth than we think.
Lindokuhle Nkosi: Your work draws on vast philosophical and mythological traditions; Greek tragedy, religious allegory, metaphysics. Can you talk about your interest in myth and how it functions in your practice?
David Ngaji: I’ve always been fascinated by the things that human beings have collectively participated in over time: myths, symbols, religious stories. Even though I’m living in 2025 and supposedly a modern person, I still ask myself: what do all these old narratives mean for my life now? How do they inform my existence, my being?
When you look at civilisations before the last few hundred years, myth is always at the centre of how people understood themselves. So I go back to those stories, not to repeat them, but to ask what they still hold. I’m especially drawn to tragedy because it deals with the big questions: the nature of suffering, man’s relationship with the divine, the desire to transcend our current condition.
Lindokuhle Nkosi: That’s very present in The Tale of Patrick the Terrible. It reads as both tragic and satirical. Can you tell us about how that figure emerged?
David Ngaji: Patrick the Terrible is a kind of personal myth. It's a sory I created but that follows a familiar pattern. It's about a man who wakes up to the contradictions of the world: the presence of suffering, the coexistence of beauty and ugliness. He becomes curious and seeks knowledge, and eventually identifies what he believes is the source of all this suffering. What Aristotle might call the “first cause,” the ontological source of being, which we might also call God.
He rebels against it, wrestles with it, and symbolically kills it. That moment, for me, represents what it feels like to challenge inherited systems of meaning. It’s a kind of philosophical purification. In tragedy, that’s called catharsis. Suffering that leads to a deeper understanding. I experience that in my own life the more I try to understand the world. The more I learn, the more I realise how little I know. That’s the cycle.
Lindokuhle Nkosi: What’s interesting is that the mythic figure at the centre of this tragedy is Patrick Star, a cartoon character from SpongeBob SquarePants. Why choose such a humorous, even absurd figure, to carry such heavy themes?
David Ngaji: Yes! I really love that kind of satirical, foolish character, like Don Quixote. There’s something very honest about the fool. I use Patrick because he disarms people. If I had used a more “serious” figure, it might feel too heavy. But with Patrick, people are curious And that gives me space to talk about deeper things.
There’s also something fundamentally human about Patrick. We like to think of ourselves as intelligent and sophisticated, but at the core, we’re all a little foolish. We don’t know why we’re here, what things mean, or what the truth is. I use Patrick as a kind of “mock hero”... someone who is unassuming, even ridiculous, but who still embarks on this epic journey.
Lindokuhle Nkosi: So in a way, you’re blending the mythic with the contemporary? The absurd and the sacrosanct?
David Ngaji: Exactly. I like weaving different periods and visual languages together—medieval, cartoon, philosophical, satirical. It allows me to create something that feels like a myth, but one that speaks to now. My hope is that people don’t just see the humour or the darkness, but the full picture: how myth still shapes us, how questioning meaning can be both painful and freeing, and how even foolishness has its own kind of wisdom.
David Ngaji’s work is currently on view in Of Mind and Myth, showing at Rele Lagos. The exhibition marks a shared return for two alumni of the Rele Young Contemporaries programme, and offers a powerful prelude to each artist’s upcoming solo presentation with the gallery. Through this presentation, Ngaji continues to expand a symbolic and spiritual visual lexicon that speaks to both the ancient and the urgent.
