Tinned food, soda bottles, boldly painted targets and stars — all this plus a cartoon-like blonde with a speech bubble.

Yes, Pop Art is with us again.

And this time it came with a new twist… a group of giant matchboxes celebrating local brands: Kifaru, Farasi and Kuku Kibiriti plus a few I had not come across before — Flora, Leopard and Happy.

These boxes, each around 50cm by 40cm and projecting from the wall, were great fun. They were beautifully realised, bursting with colour, fairly accurately painted and for me the very best part of Pop, a brief exhibition of around 50 paintings by Elaine Kehew held at the Village Market, Nairobi this month.

Pop Art hit the mid 1950s as a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, with artists determined to re-engage with the real world through quotations from advertisements, comics and famous brands.

It lasted until the late 1960s, and with its use of household goods and common symbols like stars, targets and flags struck a chord that sounds to this day.

Kehew, an American living in Nairobi, clearly drank deeply at the well of Pop; so deeply that its keynote artists inspired her to the point that she seemed reluctant to develop new ideas, with even her matchboxes falling within the genre.

Unfortunately, her enthusiasm for Pop did not always extend to the immaculate finish that was a hallmark of most of their works.

In fact, the problem with the rest of the paintings was that they had not been done terribly well. They were mostly imitative and as the artist had the grace to admit, “rip-offs” of her famous predecessors… Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns et al.

Warhol produced Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes in a scale that gave them energy and shock value. He and his assistants, of whom there were many, moved from painting to printing to ensure both clarity and to step up production to an industrial level (his studio was not called The Factory for nothing).

Made a hash of

Kehew, however, seizing on the basic idea of painting food cans with a group of paintings of Kenylon — mixed veg, githeri, butterbeans and so on — rendered the labels reasonably well but made a hash of the cans themselves, in particular the concentric rings stamped into their lids.

Kenylon Githeri, by Elaine Kehew. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

Then we had the pretend Lichtenstein, called Guns or Butter. In this largish piece (70cm by 100cm) a wide-eyed blonde stares out next to a speech bubble that reads: “I can’t believe there’s no butter.” Assault rifles painted as a repeat pattern in the background make the artist’s point: Should money be spent on armaments or on getting the basics into our shops?

This was an amusing twist on an iconic image, even if the thesis was a bit dodgy. And yet…

Whereas Lichtenstein’s meticulous paintings echoed comic book drawings and half-tone reproductions with their enlarged Ben Day dots, each line crisp and the lettering bold and authoritative, Kehew’s drawing was wavering and the lettering was weak and uneven.

The guns, instead of being lined up in soldiery fashion, lurched all over the place like bunch of drunks on parade.

I am not blaming Kehew for not being as good as Lichtenstein. The man was an original modern master after all. But I am suggesting that a little more care would have paid off handsomely.

And that was the case again and again in what could have been a highly entertaining exhibition.

Another painting called Dr Dawa imitated a kiosk sign and bore the legend “Love Portions” (sic.) I have seen many kiosk signs better drawn than that and it is a bit of a swizz to offer a clumsily painted canvas with a ready made excuse that it was a pastiche of the real thing that was equally bad.

Surely the art of a visual quote is to be at least as good as the original, so the viewer pauses to admire the intrinsic quality of the new take on the old theme as well as the thought behind it.

So, a clutch of good ideas thrown away either through carelessness or incompetence. I prefer to think the former but that is hardy a compliment, I’m afraid.

Done well, this show would have been a witty comment on Pop Art through the prism of East African products and concerns; or indeed, an incisive comment on regional concerns via that legendary art movement.

As it was, this was an exhibition in which the execution was nowhere near as strong as the ideas — and the ideas were, for the most part, someone else’s.

It was a great idea, gone pop.