If you like fabulous beasts in bright colours then the Tingatinga painters of Tanzania are ideal.

Sly commentary on the destructive power of the church points to Paul Ndema of Uganda.

And if you want your satire with a helping of sauce, then Michael Soi of Kenya is there with his procession of bawdy girls and lecherous cops.

But if you are looking for something that sums up the region, then the obvious option has to be Dennis Muraguri, the chronicler of matatu culture.

He captures the impudent face of mini-buses that in spite of many a government minister, the police and even their long suffering passengers, refuse to be tamed. And thank heavens for it.

In a world choking with political correctness, the matatus remain free spirits — kings of the road.

At one point it looked as though Muraguri, like a soap star stuck in a role, would remain typecast, unwilling, even unable, to charge.

But as his latest exhibition shows, he has broadened his act to include woodcuts, video, wall hanging and sculpture.

Six huge woodcuts dominate the exhibition, at the Circle art gallery in Lavington, Nairobi, until July 23. With the largest at around 122cm by 214cm, they command the room and astonish with breezy colours and street-wise slogans on their sides.

Yet questions remain: Why are there so many state proofs rather than finished prints? Why is Muraguri selling one of his uncancelled woodblocks? And why are the prints so scruffy?

The answer to the first one is the easiest. I am told it is because Muraguri wanted to show the process by which his prints were produced.

The woodcut Matatu Dots, in its unfinished state, has five colours — green, orange, blue, pink and yellow — while the final version, shown trendily between perspex sheets, boasts the addition of black.

Printers call black “key” and for good reason. It locks a picture together and makes it complete. Leave it out and the meat is missing; print as a visual veggie.

The state proofs make this clear.

The uncancelled woodblock is offered for around $15,000, which, when you consider you could pull off any number of prints from it, forge his signature and then flog them off, is a bit of a bargain.

The easiest thing to fake in any work of art is the signature, and, with Muraguri’s full colour prints going for up to $8,550 a piece, it becomes a tempting buy… which of course is why it has long been traditional for artists to cancel their plates with disfiguring slashes once the edition is complete.

But rarely in Kenya, for some reason.

The last question — Why are the prints so scruffy? — is harder to answer. Possibly the ink stains and other marks around the borders are there because of the sheer difficulty of printing from a block so large.

In which case surely he could have trimmed the paper to the block size and glued it to a clean sheet? Or frame the image with a tight window mount?

The uneven edges of the sheet where the knife had veered are even more difficult to explain, as is the fact that many of the prints are not squared on the paper.

I suppose that on one level it does at least demonstrate the physical effort of hand-pulling prints so large but it is odd, coming from an artist who is normally so careful about his finishing.

Alongside the prints, and a video explaining his working methods and inspiration, Muraguri is showing seven sculptures arranged in an orderly queue as though waiting to board one of his matatus.

Made of polished wood and decorated with lengths of bicycle chain, cogs, wheels and other bits of welded steel, these are meticulously finished and carry the whiff of the mechanics’ workshop; hints of cigarette smoke and hot oil.

Muraguri wanted to break away from the traditional view of African art and produced a series called Aliens, that for him represented contemporary indigenous imagery. All titles begin These aliens and their… and then the fun begins.

These Aliens and their Bad Cockroach is an insect’s head; …. their Rapper is a man at the mic;… their Beats is wearing headphones and so on: A smart take on an old idea — the hieratic head.

The finest of the lot is a wall hanging called I Dream in Alien.

Made of several hundred small plastic figures — children’s toys — they are roughly arranged in the shape of the map of Kenya and examine the West’s habit of dumping consumer goods on Africa.

These sculptures may be for Muraguri some way from the traditional idea of masks and other tribal carvings yet oddly enough his work is not; it is firmly in that tradition.

In the woodcuts, I find the swirling energy and flailing colours of the masquerade, and in the heads the beat that drives the dance.

In a gallery setting, the heads, solemn on their white plinths, carry overtones of masks — spiritual grandeur beneath a museum spotlight.

In spite of his stated distaste for Western values being rammed onto African art, Muraguri has in this exhibition, with his wildly coloured matatus, dancing makanga, vibrant toys and totemic heads, created a masquerade for the modern age.