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Kinuthia's paintings are everywhere, so let's celebrate

Friday December 09 2016
kinuts

Mkatiko, and Naivasha Lake, by Patrick Kinuthia. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Paintings by Patrick Kinuthia seem to be everywhere.

This is an artist who insists on marketing himself rather than have a gallery do the job and clearly he is very good at it.

His work is so pervasive, in every gallery you visit, at every fair and in every mixed exhibition, that there is no excuse for not being familiar with his big, bold brush strokes, riotous colours and luscious sweeps of pigment.

If you seek a respite from them, rush home and slam the door. Then they’ll arrive through the window. If you close the window, they’ll come down the chimney like so many jolly Santas. And if you light a fire to block the flue, they’ll probably pop up through a trap door like the pantomime genie.

There is no escape… so let us bow to the inevitable and celebrate Kinuthia and all his many works.

For the fact is that we must not allow the man’s ubiquity to blind us to the fact that at his best he is a very good painter indeed… up there with others in this genre like Timothy Brook, Sophie Walbeoffe and Fitsum Behre Waldebanos.

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Like them, his is an essentially painterly talent; defining his subjects with tone and reserving line to underpin his compositions with the minimum of vigorous marks needed to emphasis structure.

Like them he has a thorough understanding of colour, form and composition although in his case his colours veer between the gentle lemons and pinks of light on a country road to sudden outrageous outbursts in his portraits and group scenes employing tomato red, pepper green and pineapple yellow — the gaudy palette of a pizza.

He also has the knack of making his fast drying acrylics look as oleaginous as oils.

Kinuthia can capture a lot with a little but he does have a tendency to make hurried judgements he then fails to correct. There is evidence of this in his current show Ni Ya Leo (For Today) at the Art Space off Riverside Drive, Nairobi until mid-January.

The evidence comes, oddly enough, in one of the best paintings in the entire exhibition; a view of a country lane called Lukenya Road. At first sight it is a brilliant sketch boldly executed — a landscape you could almost eat. And then you notice the large tree in the centre.

The lynchpin of the composition, it is counter weight to the road heading diagonally left. Bizarrely, the sky has been dashed in after the tree, cutting into its crown, an unnatural crop that illogically moves it to the background.

Hung next to it is the ravishing little Naivasha Lake, the thin trunks of trees described by scraping the wooden end of the brush through the top layer of paint to reveal the dark background in a series of brisk vertical strokes.

And beyond that is the larger Naivasha which proves once again how very good Kinuthia is at catching light on water.

Restrained, elegant, assured, here are three canvases that capture the essence of the outdoors; the smell of wet grass, the way dust catches the throat, the sudden flash of light.

Kinuthia’s portraits, I feel, are hollow in comparison; the lights are on, as they say, but there’s no one at home. His women are beautiful, look soulful, attempt to enchant but seem not to breathe. They are his Stepford Wives, ideals caught in time but lacking life.

Then there are his groups of women at market stalls. I like the Fauves but even they seemed more controlled than these gaudy works. They are an interruption; an irritation to me, even though they demonstrate Kinuthia’s gift for unexpected compositions. Mkatiko (Dance) shows two women in yellow blouses forming a strong diagonal down the canvas but the background is alive with noisy colour and the dancers all but vanish in the melee.

Another irritation in this show is the hang.

In the downstairs gallery, the views of Lamu, finished in the coolest of greys and ivory highlighted with gorgeous little touches of salmon pink, are placed in a room full of garish market scenes. It is as if the curator wanted to demonstrate the best way to kill off Kinuthia’s better paintings.

Upstairs, his painting of donkeys is shown among a mixed group by gallery artists, and two other Kinuthias are casually propped up on the floor. Clearly, they are not intended to be a part of the exhibition but happened to be in stock so were left where they lay. Surely any sensitive curator would either have put them out of sight or promoted them into the fold.

Thus Kinuthia is hoist with his own petard — an unwitting victim of his own relentless output.

But although prolific I see nothing cynical about his work. Hurried yes, occasionally careless, true; but also unfailingly enthusiastic, packed with energy and the sheer pleasure of caressing paint across the warp and weft of rough canvas.

At their best, Kinuthia’s paintings offer a sensual delight not to be missed.

Frank Whalley runs Lenga Juu, an arts consultancy based in Nairobi.

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