Advertisement

Taking apart reality, thought and emotion

Saturday November 18 2017
ka

Divergent Personalities, by Moses Nyawanda. PHOTO | KARI MUTU | NMG

By KARI MUTU

A collection of Moses Nyawanda’s artwork is showing at the Nairobi National Museum in an exhibition called Demigods and Demagogues.

The exhibition’s title suggests that the paintings will be of deities and firebrand politicians. But this is a mixed bag of abstracts, from romance to tenderpreneurs, captured in a satirical style.

Most of his paintings are oils on canvas, his medium of choice.

Nyawando employs an idiosyncratic technique of applying several layers of paint with a palette knife, “so that the work ends up looking like it was done in pastels,” he says.

His colour choice is mostly bright and bold, with a few drawn in earthy shades or a blend of cool colours. The painting Demagogues is of a normal face among macabre visages and elementary body forms, painted in rustic colours.

Nyawando’s combination of oil and acrylics in some paintings creates a chalky look, such as in Untitled I — painted in brilliant shades of red, blue and purple.

Advertisement

In several pictures the canvas is completely filled with partly figurative fragmented shapes drawn in straight and curved lines.

After a while, it gets exhausting trying to interpret these busy, abstract images. Perhaps that is why the simple image of two men in orange clothes in Divergent Personalities is pleasantly different.

Some of the flat characters in the paintings look like jesters. An example is that of workers with green faces and toothy grimaces in Housebands of Nairobi. They wear green overalls, red heeled shoes, smart white shoulder bags and carry the tools of their trade.

In the painting Teenagers in Love, a young man and woman with stiff, wide-eyed looks tentatively reach out to each other.

Over the years, Nyawanda has produced works on relationships, generational divides, politics, corruption, current events and technology. With each topic, he reviews the visual image in his mind.

“I put it back together in ways that reveal the many different layers of reality, thought and emotion,” he says.

Winner of several art awards, Nyawanda helped to establish the Railway Museum Art Studio in Nairobi. The exhibition continues until the end of November.

Advertisement