If you want to see what one of Kenya’s finest artists is up to, visit the Goethe Institut in Nairobi.

For there, until July 23 Peterson Kamwathi is showing a series of huge drawings — each some 5ft by 8ft long — that one reader was quick to tell me make up the finest exhibition ever seen in Kenya.

That is a huge claim and one perhaps made in the excitement of the moment, on first exposure to these astonishing works.

Yet I must agree that I have seen few shows so powerful.

Kamwathi has combined formidable technical ability with a strong message that strikes to the heart of the 2007 election fiasco.

Of all the artwork produced in response to the poll and the subsequent violence (including the photographic exhibition Kenya Burning) this strikes me as the most penetrating.

The fact that it is a work of the hand and the eye and without the mechanical intervention of a camera makes it even stronger, more raw, a greater assault on the senses.

The life-size drawings were not intended as a polemic, Kamwathi told me. Rather they represented his “reflections” on the events of 2007.

I suggested that irrespective of his intentions they nonetheless amounted to a sustained attack on the venality and incompetence of almost everyone connected with that “cursed election” and the violence it triggered.

“Yes, it is a reaction to the violence although there are no scenes of violence in the exhibition. It relates more to the institutions than the people involved,” Kamwathi went on.

He added, somewhat elliptically: “I came out of the water. I am no longer in the water, yet I am wet.”

This all seems a trifle esoteric from anyone other than a Zen master, but I presume it means we have all been marked by that election and the marks are still on our skins.

The exhibition flyer tells us that the drawings give “room for reflection rather than confrontation or making judgements.”

To me, Kamwathi’s apparent wish to distance himself from the judgemental seems somewhat political, if not disingenuous.

Was the man who stopped the tanks in Tiananmen Square simply rooted to the spot in surprise while reflecting on the unexpected appearance of an armoured column, or was he trying to make a point? Quite.

The exhibition reminded me of the recent remark by Sir Richard Eyre, director of the UK’s National Theatre: “Art gives us the opportunity to look into someone’s mind and soul.”

Given that an artist’s work is necessarily a voyage of self-exploration, one would also hope for some insight into what can be termed the universal condition.

In other words, by peering into Kamwathi’s soul as he reflects on the 2007 poll, one would hope to find reactions that chime with many of our feelings, and add to an understanding of the event, the conditions that produced it and its effects on us all.

An artist does well to generalise from the particular, while hopefully creating objects of beauty that lift the spirit and nourish our own souls, too.

Looking into Kamwathi’s soul is made easier by the fact that the pictures have not been arranged in chronological order, deliberately destroying the narrative sequence and polemical impact.

The artist disrupted the logical timeline of the eight drawings — shown under the general title of Sitting Allowance — to present them in a way that he felt was most visually interesting.

Thus, moving around the room from left to right we first meet the Religious Leaders, followed by the Police, the Men in Black (representing people who gained power through the poll — either as successful candidates or ex-officio appointees, like parastatal heads), Election Observers, the Press, Candidates, the members of the ECK (masked, and peering through the eyeholes in their ballot forms 16A) and finally, and actually in correct order, the Peacebrokers … the people who came to clear up the mess.

This means the light and linear approach of the Religious Leaders offers a contrast in tone and style to the sombre weight of the adjoining advancing Police, while the Election Observers, the Media and the Candidates grouped together on the end wall and drawn in similar style, gain in power from their proximity.

In each picture the lifesize subjects engage us with direct eye contact, remorselessly holding our attention.

The riot police in their black uniforms, shields at the ready, advance on us packed and menacing. Not confrontational? Really?

The Candidates, when we get to meet them, appear variously confident or confused. For there they all are: Statesmen soon to be found all at sea in storm with the tide of history running strongly against them. Send for Captain Kofi Annan!

By disturbing the rhythm of the pictures, Kamwathi (who hung the show himself) created an exhibition dependent on its iconography rather than its message.

It is all the more unexpected and interesting for that.

Its polemical impact — the warning it contains — arrives slowly and when it does come is more shockingly powerful for the way it has crept under your guard.

Technically the darker pictures represent a difficult trick to pull off.

By working with charcoals and black crayon, with only the occasional flashes of colour (on the police shields, for instance) he has left himself little room for manoeuvre.

He had to produce the tones sufficient to delineate his subjects within an extremely limited range — and to create at the same time a unique iconography with the somewhat truncated figures (anatomically their heads are generally too large and the bodies too short, for example) that remain recognisable while unique.

It is a tribute to his expertise with the medium that he has managed this.

There are precedents for the deliberate distortion of the human figure within a literal canon, of course, the most obvious being that most famous of all works of art, Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

Look at it carefully: The heads are too small, the arms too long and the musculature too developed for anyone outside a Mr Universe contest. Yet it worked, because the Renaissance master was painting an ideal that everyone recognised.

And so, on a temporal level, is Kamwathi.

In fact, there is a sureness and confidence about Kamwathi’s drawing that continues to delight.

Black on black, rich and velvety, laboriously completing one layer, fixing it, then working over it again and again, to create the massing of tone and the volumes he needed.

This symphony of resonating tones reminded me a little of the charcoal drawings of Georges Seurat and there can be few better examples to follow.

We have seen Kamwathi’s subtle messages disguised by a beguiling manipulation of his medium before: Iron fists in velvet gloves.

It first became apparent in his lifesize Sheep series (there’s one on permanent show at the RaMoMA in Parklands) where the strong message, in that case anti-war, is also allowed to seep through slowly; via the tiny icons of machine guns, nuclear symbols, and tanks that make up the sheeps’ shadows.

You think you are looking at a sheep: You are actually looking at a powerful warning.

Again, he recently completed an elegant series of charcoal drawings of doves.

Typically each expired gracefully on the paper … death seems to be the current fate of doves of peace.

Like a spinning firework Kamwathi is working simultaneously in a variety of media — drawing, oil paintings, etching, screenprints, lithographs, monoprints, even installations and light boxes. He also sculpts in clay, stone and bronze.

The artist’s energy is prodigious and to add to his workload he is, as I write, undertaking a residency in New York with another in Holland on the way.

With flying toilets in Kibera, the government no doubt has more pressing things to do than to buy art for the nation.

Understandable but a pity because it means these astonishing drawings — like most good art produced in Kenya nowadays — will probably end up outside the country as foreign collectors reach for their wallets.

Rich, velvety and black, the drawings of Sitting Allowance line the walls of the Goethe Institut as sonorous as warning bells. And to quote the poet John Donne: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls – it tolls for thee.”

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