Art driven by intellectual narratives can be rather hard work.

It sometimes requires tiresome thinking to drag the back-story from the image, by which time its corporeal beauty has vapourised in a blur of speculation.

I much prefer the more visceral approach that allows the succulent writhing of paint to create a new reality that often gives us a more authentic interpretation of the subject.

No matter, we are looking at what we see, and what we are seeing at one East African exhibition is work jammed into the overarching brief of conflict.

There are said to be five areas of conflict in man — Man versus Man, Man vs Self, Man vs Nature, Man vs Technology and Man vs Society — and it is around that shaky thesis that the exhibition was curated, by gallerist Veronica Paradinas Duro, who runs GravitArt, an online gallery supported by occasional pop-up shows.

This latest one is in the studio/gallery complex of Kobo Safaris, off Riara Road, Nairobi, and it makes for an interesting show, if one that is encumbered by a sense of responsibility towards its concept.

Touring it is simple thanks to an excellent full colour guide that features thumbnail photographs of each work against details of the artist’s name, title of the work, sizes and price… an example worth copying, I should think.

Even the thinking is helped — by a leaflet that details the areas of conflict and attempts to explain how they relate to the 25 paintings, sculpture and assemblages.

The gallery, all 130 square metres of white walls and fluorescent strips, is supported by central columns echoed by the hang, which sees a number of key works suspended from the ceiling.

The conflict of Man vs Man is represented by Eltayeb Dawelbeit, the Sudanese artist long settled in Kenya, and by Martin Onyis.

Eltayeb presents four of his typical hieratic heads, Resurrection I-IV, scoured and scratched into the odd shaped boards and assembled cupboard doors that are his canvases.

They appear to struggle free, blind yet curiously powerful, from their distressed backgrounds to pose questions of recognition and identity.

Most effective among them is his Resurrection I, some 200cm tall, that stands on its distressed blue trunk and features matatu route numbers glued to the surface.

Chequer boards, a set square and stenciled numbers make up other embellishments to this head that tells of Nubian history tied to the modern obsession with numbering objects to record, hold and control them.

Next to it, Martin Onyis examines how we interpret each other’s intentions and actions with 12 figures each in the window frame of an old suspended door. Called Theory of Space, Collective Movement it hangs next to his panel of a single figure contained within three frames Theory of Space, Individual Movement.

Man vs Self is illuminated by the Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele and the Kenyan sculptor Kevin Oduor, both of whom interrogate notions of what consititutes a body’s completeness.

Oduor, known for his public sculptures including that of Dedan Kimathi in the city’s CBD, offers two disembodied pairs of legs in an installation called Existence, while Bekele’s five canvases, bright as jewels, continue the theme in two dimensions. A small boxed video loop shows him at work.

Man vs Nature sees a couple of paintings by Paul Onditi from 2012 and 2014, featuring his Everyman figure Smokey protesting about climate change, pollution and the loss of resources, plus a large Peter Elungat from last year.

A pin-headed figure, representing the artist, peeps from behind a tumble of mushrooms on a red background, thus making himself part of the natural world. But why mushrooms and not broccoli or beans? We are not told. I feel intellectually bereft.

Most interesting in this group are two small (23.5cm by 28.5cm) mixed media paintings on paper by Souad Abdel Rasoul in her faux naïf style — two lovers and a woman with a flower — that question the conflation of our physical (that is, natural) and psychological states.

Illustrating the conflict of Man vs Technology are the excellent drawing skills and colour washes of Lemek Tompoika in Of Gods I and III in which bodies morph into progressively darker voids, symbolic of society’s expectations and impositions.

With their juxtaposition of humanity and mechanical structures they echo the adjoining robotic sculptures of Dennis Muraguri who took a break from recording the city’s matatu madness to produce four welded steel pieces that juggle mechanical components and human anatomy.

Which leaves us with Man vs Society, a clear hit for Shabu Mwangi and Rashid Diab with a painting apiece dealing in Mwangi’s case with the plight of immigrants, while in Diab’s meticulously composed canvas, the figures of elegantly swathed women seek a route from their oppression to freedom.

Yes, to get the most out of this exhibition you do have to think a bit. But happily the overall standard is sufficiently high for us to enjoy the paintings and sculptures purely for their formal qualities too.