A slow fuse burning

Only the week before I bemoaned the fact that many artists when changing style in the name of developing their talent seem to take one step forward and two steps back.

But last week I came across one artist who has proved to be an exception to this gloomy rule: Larissa Hoops.

Hoops, still only 29, is perhaps best known for her deconstruction of breakfast tables… each picture consisting of six or so engaging small paintings of a table cloth (usually a colourful khanga), a bunch of bananas, a newspaper and a coffee pot and sugar bowl which, when hung together, form one inviting spread.

Two such groupings — each proving that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts — are in her current exhibition at Le Rustique restaurant on Nairobi’s General Mathenge Road.

But it is her latest work that caught my eye this time. First, there is a series of super-realistic street scenes and, secondly and more importantly, there is a group of collages that I believe might well make this artist’s name.

The street scenes are a useful showcase of Hoops’s ability. Out she goes with her camera, often using gigantic billboards as a backdrop, then it’s back to the studio for a few self indulgent days seeing just how accurately she can get it all down. The answer seems to be, very accurately, indeed.

The passers-by would recognise themselves, I’m sure of that, and Viceroy and Zain, among other leading Kenyan brands, should be paying her royalties for the puff.

But it is Hoops’s collages that are outstanding. There are four on show — all of room interiors, one of a kitchen, one of a salon and two of the same sitting room, made two years apart.

Each is meticulously constructed with paper, photographs, cloth, and paint. And this painstaking effort is amply rewarded with the creation, quite simply, of some of the finest work I have seen by any artist recently.

There is in them an echo of the 1956 collage of Richard Hamilton called Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? That picture, also a room interior, with its Charles Atlas muscleman flexing his biceps next to a bikini beauty (below), was one of the precursors of Pop Art.

Hoops’s pictures are rather less frantic, more spacious and certainly less eclectic.

This quietness gives them a long fuse that smokes away as you view them until realisation arrives with a flash.

The two sitting room pictures, called Tea and Toast and Tea and Toast 2 deal with nothing less than the state of the nation.

They take the post-election violence as their starting point yet, unlike most artists and photographers who stop at the murder and the flames, they take us forward to today, to a more prosperous and settled time when, with the violence behind us, we hope for a better and fairer future.

Tea and Toast was made in February 2008 and records the height of the violence. It shows a very ordinary sitting room with a cup of tea and two toasted jam sandwiches on the table.

In a bookcase to the left are newspapers (the Saturday Nation has the headline Ray of Hope) and books that wittily include Matthew Kneale’s short stories Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance.

Through the window, beyond the neat white picket fence, can be seen absolute mayhem. People are engulfed by fire, a car is a burnt-out wreck, the neighbourhood is ablaze.

The second picture Tea and Toast 2, was made in February this year.

Superficially, it is the same room. But a careful look reveals a number of changes (rather like those paired pictures in children’s puzzle books where you are invited to spot the differences.)

Prosperity has arrived. There is now a tablecloth, for instance, and the old battered TV has been replaced by a smart plasma Sony with Playstation controls.

The toasted sandwich on the table looks as though it could be ham instead of jam and a book has been added to the shelves: Starting Your Own Business.

The headline in the Nation states: Kenya marches to a new dawn.

Clearly it is a time of confidence, of renewed certainty in a future worth investing in. The fuse is still slowly burning — and then comes the flash.

Look through the window and all is calm. Peace reigns. The burnt-out shell of the car is still there but it is being used as a display table by a vegetable seller.

Elsewhere people quietly go about their business beneath a clear sky, unafraid.

These are important pictures and deserve to find a home in a major Kenyan collection. They are incisive and relevant to the nation and must stay together.

Whoever does end up the owner, they can be confident they have bought a piece of Kenya’s history, as well as two very fine pictures, indeed.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi. Email:fwhalley@gmail.com