Modernist playwright Samuel Beckett has characterized his theatre to be a form of ‘impoverishment’—a gesture that runs along the streams of the absurd and the minimal. Threading these and informed by his experiences of the war, the emptiness in his theatre has been dominantly interpreted to comment on human existence as suffering amidst the wretchedness of living. The study argues that this gesture of impoverishment can be observed in the abstraction of painter Marciano Galang, specifically in his late student years during the latter half of the 1960s—the time when he disclosed his fondness for the writings of the playwright. His paintings during this period were made of sparse forms and mishmash of everyday derelicts on his mutilated and tired-out canvases. Examined in parallel with Beckett’s piece “Waiting for Godot” (premiered 1953), Galang’s impoverishment of these paintings reveals his pessimism and resignation about the future when fright of a global nuclear warfare was severely palpable, which he likewise lamented on in a set of published reflections. A tragedy powered by what he referred to as the “monopoly of legitimate violence,” the world order then condemned humanity in a cyclical race on which nation can display and even use the greatest violence. But unlike Beckett, Galang—coming from his positionality as part of a post-colony—underscored the most helpless, who were made collateral to the destructive forces at the hand of a powerful few, relegating them to a condition of deprivation and dispossession of their belongingness to the world.