The playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote Six Characters in Search of an Author and now I can offer you an updated East African version — Sixty Pictures in Search of a Show.

Some 26 of them are being exhibited for one week only at the Standard Chartered HQ in Nairobi. They will be taken down next Friday.

Entry is by invitation only (security being the main reason cited) and thus very few people will actually get to see the exhibition, curated by the artist Camille Wekesa.

And that is a shame. For as one of the few who has seen it (I was given access during the hanging, before the official opening) I can tell you it includes excellent work by some of the most talented artists in the region.

And for sure it deserves not just a wider audience, but something akin to any audience at all.

Credit (at a suitably ruinous interest rate) should go to the bank for shouldering its corporate responsibility and allowing these artists onto its sleek walls.

Banks are not new to art. Like hotels, they often find it convenient to display paintings in their impressive halls; indeed, the Commercial Bank of Africa collects art and used to show pictures for sale in the windows of its Wabera Street branch, in Nairobi.

Standard Chartered itself hangs paintings in its corridors and its UK branch boasts a growing collection of portraits, hence the appeal to the bank of this show.

Hopefully it will choose to add some of our East African talent to its catalogue.

But back to the show. Like Gray’s flower born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air, the paintings are now in full bloom, if only briefly.

Although called African Portraits the exhibition should really be called African People.

Portraits are surely specific, yet here there are street scenes, one or two imaginary compositions of many heads (in the case of Come to Me by Wanyu Brush) and paintings of imaginary people used as icons of, for instance, post-election violence — a rich seam still being heavily mined.

Ancent Soi contributes three typically quirky village scenes, while Jemma Davies shows a precise hand with her glimpses of town life; traditional, underpinned by sound drawing and heavy on the formal qualities that indicate a thorough grounding in academic skills.

Her Gossips at Watamu is a particularly successful essay.

From Tim Brookes comes an economical little sketch in red chalk of Mother and Child, and Kampala-based Lucki Mutebi offers two crisp portraits of African women.

Dominating the hall is a wall-sized painting by Fitsum Berhe. Looking rather like the stage set for a modern opera, it puzzled me.

Painted with broad strokes on two panels, the left half of the man’s face is in the warm colours of the day, while the right half is restricted to the cool blues of night.

Aha, night and day, I thought. Yet the reflection in each lens of the man’s mirrored sunglasses is of a beach scene in strong sunlight. Confusion. Critic foiled again.

A smaller portrait by Berhe, about the size of a coffee table, is of the sculptor Chelenge von Rampelberg, and as well as being an attractively wristy painting, it is a very good likeness.

Beatrice Wanjiku is represented by a large and ominous head — the mouth small and glittering in a sea of Prussian blue — and Richard Kimathi is another artist presenting a large imaginary portrait, one of his mysterious veiled women series.

Dale Webster was an obvious choice for the show — of all the artists here, he is probably the only professional portrait painter — and his three pictures include a rosy little image of the glass artist Nani Croze.

Holding the eye are two charcoal drawings by Peterson Kamwathi, based loosely on self portraits (he is just about recognisable from them).

In each the face is partially obscured by graphic devices, in one what might be the bent bars of an American footballer’s face guard and in the other a giant visa cancellation stamp.

Concerned with identity, they are masks, presenting one face while concealing another, and represent a telling comment on shifting layers of reality and the way we perceive people.

Shabu Mwangi’s two pictures are those concerned with post-election violence.

Deserted Generation places the body of a child within the wraith-like outline of an adult, and shows how the security the child should enjoy is lessened as the older generation slips away.

It is about how a thriving community fragments when its anchor — its elders — have died.

Similarly the smaller of the two works, What I Call Home, comments on how security, built up over so many years, can be destroyed in just one day when the home is burnt down leaving just an empty space.

Mwangi’s continuing commentary on the Violence is the more powerful for its elegance and the subtly of its colouring… we are beguiled by the beauty of the work before its message sinks slowly home.

Both his paintings carried echoes of the Kenya Burning exhibition of photographs from the Violence, now being given a reprise at Nairobi’s GoDown arts centre — essential viewing with another general election soon upon us.

It comes with a printed warning of its graphic (read “horrific”) content plus the timely slogan “Never Again.”

African Portraits is an excellent little exhibition that, like the boll weevil of the American folk song, is looking for a home.

Anyone with imagination and a space to fill should contact Camille Wekesa and earn the gratitude not only of the artists but of all who are able to visit.
Great show — it is just that it needs some people to see the flowers bloom.

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