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Enjoyable meal of three courses

Thursday April 09 2015
art

Kikuyu, by Patrick Kinuthia. PHOTO | Frank Whalley

Someone once told me a good exhibition should be like an enjoyable meal… tasty of course, but also well balanced and hopefully nutritious too.

Congratulations then to the chef of a show called Shags, at the crisp new exhibition hall in Nairobi’s Village Market. The man in the tall white hat is William Ndwiga of the Little Art Gallery, who has brought together three artists who complement each other very well.

There is the richness of Patrick Kinuthia, the sharp taste of the innovative Fred Abuga, and the small but precise offering — the dessert perhaps — of James Njoroge, who ends our meal with a bombe surprise.

The theme is the variety of village life, with what Ndwiga calls “its nostalgic rural idyll.”

Kinuthia is easy to digest. (OK, I’ll stop the metaphor here.) His lush landscapes and pretty girls are well known and equally popular. And here there are a few notable pieces to enjoy.

The first is his view of Kikuyu, a small country scene so solidly painted you could walk into it. And next door to that is a wristy view of Nanyuki, in which he veers almost towards abstraction, sketching in a few bushes by scribbling into the paint with the sharp end of his brush. It was more pared down than a lot of his work. I admire economy and I liked it a lot.

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Then, among the women, and the man dozing as his chickens scratched around his feet, were a couple of pictures lurching bravely into Timothy Brooke territory… a herd of cows in a thorn-bush landscape and a team of white oxen that could or could not be pulling a cart, lost in the dust. Compared with Brooke, these seemed full of unnecessary highlights and flourishes but a good try, all the same.

Kinuthia panders to a popular taste and apart from some of his landscapes, does not reveal much that we do not know already. But the man can draw and he orchestrates his palette rather well. Credit where it is due.

Our next artist, Fred Abuga, came to the public’s attention through his novel style — short, blocky brushstrokes each of a single colour that when viewed from a distance coalesced into a scene.

The Pointillists used coloured dots; Abugu used coloured slabs. It was unusual, it was interesting and most importantly, it worked.

Here was an artist giving visible proof, if you like, of the way colours were literally the building blocks of any scene; it was a celebration of the artifice of art. It brought him recognition, respect and success in terms of sales and commissions.

But what began as an original attempt by Abuga to deconstruct his surroundings has gradually become more exaggerated until now he is elongating each brushstroke to the point that they tend to obscure, rather than illuminate the landscapes. He has reached the stage, where to paraphrase McLuhan, the medium is the method, not the message.

In Morning, for example, the scene is so stylised that the time of day is shown by the title, not the play of light. The shadows are so dark and direct it can only be noon.

Of course, artists must develop to survive, and their business is the continuing exploration of their world for their own and hopefully our enjoyment and understanding.

Sometimes they get it stunningly right, as in Abuga’s groundbreaking earlier work, and sometimes they push it just that bit too far, as he has here. What was exciting and vital has become a mannerism — a party trick — leading him to a dead end.

Knowing the intelligence that informed the technical wizardry of his earlier paintings, I will be fascinated to see what comes next. There is a hint in some of his plywood constructions, sadly not shown here, which effectively echo the slabs, turn them monochrome and put them in three dimensions.

They are beautiful and satisfying to absorb. Possibly they offer him a way out of the cul-de-sac.

The third artist in this invigorating exhibition, James Njoroge, has also exaggerated his technique; but in his case it has returned him to what should have been his starting point. He has some seven collages in this show, of which six try to copy paintings.

Njoroge cuts up the pages of magazines and sticks them down so each little piece of paper represents a brush stroke. He mimics the act of painting with paper, scissors and glue and very clever it is too. But that is all it is — a triumph of technique over content.

The beauty of collage is that you can drill down deeply into your subject, almost counter-intuitively, by offering a series of passing references to it, each hint adding to a sense of the whole.

It is a subtle and oblique medium with its own lexicon, one that allows an artist to short circuit reason and flash the work into your mind immaculate and complete; not one medium that needs to copy another.

And finally, Njoroge seems to have taken the point. It can be seen in his revelatory collage Main Street. Some lettering lies on the road surface, doing double duty as an echo of street furniture while enticing the eye further into the composition.

Upright shards stand for the buildings that line the road, creating a strong rhythm that runs us to the vanishing point.

It is not the street, but it is the essence of the street. Njoroge is there, at last.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, a fine arts and media consultancy based in Nairobi.

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