Meet the onion, it’s soft but can make you weep

Hard on the outside but soft inside… you could probably apply that to many people you know, and it is also the theme of a recent painting by Jesse N’gang’a.

Intriguingly called Onion Cactus.

Like all his work, its impact is immediate and visceral. It kicks you in the gut.

Skulls shriek and leer; one face is implacable, masked; crimson bleeds across at least half of the canvas which is covered with graffiti-like scrawls of made-up words, deliberately nonsensical.

Unlike most of Ng’ang’a’s work, however, there is no single dominant image, unless you count the green onion with its stalks and cascade of leaves, the bulb deliberately painted wet and allowed to dribble down to take root in the picture surface.

Colour leaps and whirls across the canvas to which have been pasted pages from the artist’s sketchbook — each containing miniature paintings, studies for other pictures and yet more scribbles — while elsewhere are images of the DNA spiral, an X-Ray drawing of a pig, a large spoon and bottom right, a mysterious list of words that mean nothing at all.

Missing is the cactus of the title, except for the word “CUCTUS” scrawled across the top of the picture, an eerie pink on black.

Cacti of course are tough and spiky on the outside but so soft inside that you can drink their juice. And an onion, like this painting, has many layers.

What is so astonishing about the picture is that in spite of its furious mixture of images — I counted more than 100 of them and then gave up — it remains an entirely cohesive composition and a seductive work of art.

It really is an extraordinary painting, this concatenation of domestic imagery — an instinctive slice through life.

Onion Cactus is currently on show at the One-Off Gallery in Rosslyn, Nairobi, as part of a mixed exhibition packed with good things.

Timothy Brook, a favourite of people who appreciate well structured pictures underpinned by sound drawing, has a number of oils on show, notable among them being a view of elephants on the savannah and a large, rapid sketch of wildebeest caught after the rain.

Xavier Verhoest is represented by a set of small flower pieces.

I think they are of Canna lilies but I could easily be wrong.

Clearly, their form appealed to him and even translated into his customarily muted palette, they have a freshness and strength that was a delight to see.