Food and fine art, or art and fine food for that matter, have long been happy tablemates. There are cafes in Paris and Zurich lined with the work of artists now famous — Picasso and Derain, Vlaminck and Modigliani… who, when impoverished painters or refugees, paid for their meals and drinks with a sketch or something from the studio.

Restaurants also tend to be places where the reasonably affluent meet. If you can afford to eat out, the reasoning goes, then you have probably got enough spare cash to buy a picture.

And so the practice grew of using the walls to showcase art for sale. Have a crepe: Buy some art.

In Nairobi the tradition continues apace.

The Talisman in Karen, where a show of watercolours by Sophie Walbeoffe — elephants, ostrichs and other wildlife — has just ended, is one example.

Another is Le Rustique in the capital’s General Mathenge Drive. The exhibitions there are curated by Xavier Verhoest, himself an artist, who tries to ensure his clients receive a sympathetic showing among the tables and chairs.

Currently Le Rustique is home to a group of paintings by Beatrice Wanjiku, one of the crop of young painters setting the pace in East Africa. It’s on until November 10. But more of her in a minute.

One of the problems of exhibiting in a restaurant is that the walls are coloured to enhance the food, rather than the pictures.

In the serene surroundings of a gallery this can be controlled by repainting the walls to suit each show. In a restaurant this is not practical — and on top of that, the artist has to compete for attention against a riot of bright tablecloths, napkins, waiters’ uniforms, cushions and heaven knows what else.

The result is a random spattering of colours, rather as though you are looking at a pizza on a plate. Which half the time, you probably are.

There is an upside however. And that is that the surroundings of a restaurant — give or take a waitress or two — are probably a fair match for the average home.

Most of us choose comfort and colour over the Spartan surroundings of a minimalist exhibition space, so you do at least get some sense of what the pictures might look like on your own wall.

However, the paintings of Beatrice Wanjiku offered at Le Rustique would, I have to say, look far better in the cool spaces of a gallery than on the restaurant wall.

Verhoest has done his best, wisely limiting her to 10 pictures, which at least gives each the space it needs. These are dense, many-layered paintings — busy, busy, busy — and the multiplicity of images and references each contains generates an initial noise which needs room in which to subside, so the pictures can be read calmly; as intelligently as they have been created.

Three of the finest pictures at Le Rustique were snapped up on the opening night by one collector who, I understand, intends to hang them side by side, turning them into a triptych.

It is a perceptive point, for the pictures do indeed gain from each other, resonating imagery and creating an exciting visual intensity.

It is said that all serious art (serious, as opposed to the pretentious nonsense aimed at the place where money meets ignorance) is a self portrait, or a voyage of self discovery.

Wanjiku’s mixed media paintings more than most accept that challenge and speak overtly of no less than an exploration of the human condition.

In this she shares the stage with Peterson Kamwathi, Jesse Ng’ang’a and Richard Kimathi. — all four sending us dispatches from the front line in the Battle of Life.

Wanjiku’s central, defining image is the hieratic head, a totem she uses to investigate the rites of passage, transitions, journeys and homecomings that mark our lives.

The heads is a safe figurative reference point from which she extrapolates what she calls, “the notion of the self through the perception of the other.”

Most successful are those pictures such as Quintessence of Loneliness and Effacement l, where the ephemera is tightly controlled and closely grouped, leaving large areas of coolly coloured canvas to balance the hectic activity.

Least successful therefore,, in my view, are those others where the additions are scattered like confetti, or sent whirling across the picture plane in a wild, curving scream.

There is too much to sort out, too much to take in while retaining a rational reading of the image as a whole.
But if you can visually strip away the frantic surroundings of a busy restaurant, you will find a visit to Wanjiku’s exhibition richly rewarding.

For these are excellent paintings that deserve a long and careful look.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email: [email protected]