Smearing and dragging paint on canvas and board, Shabu Mwangi exposes his soul.

His previous practice, which earned him recognition as one of Kenya’s most exciting — and driven — artists, focused on the violence inherent in society and its manifestations of inequality and despair.

Now in his current solo show he explores his interior world; the wellspring of his imagination and his own reaction to the moral chaos he sees around him.

A Valentine laden with love, it is not.

Whereas before his paintings projected that chaos through the energy or quiescence of his pigments — the brush and knife digging, slashing or gently sliding across the surface — the energy is if anything even greater but now layered washes of oils add luminescence to his statements of injustice, pain and fear.

The beauty of his marks is an essential pleasure of his paintings.

Tender little dribbles, fat oleaginous slabs, slippery strokes in which every bristle scores the surface, or slithery trails writhing across the picture plane — an Expressionist delight of which an Ensor or an Auerbach would be proud — all add to the excitement.

But they are not the point of the work. They enhance the pent-up fury of his message but remain a means to the end, not the end in itself.

And that is what makes Mwangi such a serious and authentic artist rather than a dilettante who has seen a few paintings, watched a few videos and copied someone else’s style.

Making paintings that burn with a quiet anger springs from his desire for equality and justice and embody his reaction to the unfairness he sees.

And he knows more about that than most. Mwangi founded the Wajukuu art centre in Lunga Lunga, part of Nairobi’s sprawling Makuru slum some 12 years ago. It began with 18 members but five were shot dead by the police; one as an escapee and four as criminals hurrying to commit robbery.

The studio remains open while its founder continues to consider the hostilities within society, the way they reveal themselves and in this latest show the effect they have had upon him and the quality of his own response.

He does so not by overt references to the primacy of the mark, the heart of a painter’s creativity, but rather by considering himself as a symbol of the damage unjust society can cause.

Of the 17 paintings that were on show at the Circle in February, all but one are self-portraits; oblique examinations of his own psyche.

Given his subject you might expect a room full of misery with sombre colours and angry, jagged brushstrokes. Yet that is far from the case.

Just as Francis Bacon’s howls of outrage came decked in melting lilacs, soft pinks and delicate tints of lemon and green, so Mwangi’s increasingly sure sense of colour also beguiles.

He has pepped up the mainly dark green and grey palette of previous shows to develop a more vibrant practice. Red Gloves, for instance, features delicious splashes of tomato red while blue and yellow carry his Behind the Mirror. Blue again emboldens the enigmatic Birth Place III while in Distorted Self charcoal and black is the ground against which sing zig-zags of dark pink, thick rivulets of yellow, violent scribbles of orange and slashes of cerulean and ultramarine.

Three of the paintings are on board and these small, simpler works might have the most immediate impact but surely it is the larger, more immersive pieces named above that will reach out as the more lasting and rewarding statements.

In two of the paintings a strong horizontal line crosses the canvas; in each case the final mark. In Losing Self it is bright yellow, in Farm and Beauty, a Mediterranean blue. These lines literally underscore the artist’s then inability to question himself further and signify an end to that painting.

Mwangi has accompanied his paintings by seven of his own poems, one of which ends with the line, “We are seated at the source of our seas”, giving the exhibition its title.

For me that is entirely appropriate because whenever I see this artist’s work I am reminded of that line from Yeats’ Easter 1916, a poem about revolution,

 “A terrible beauty is born’

Shabu Mwangi is an artist with something relevant to say and he says it with beauty, clarity and a controlled violence that echoes his subject.

His subject is himself and it is us.

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This article was first published in The EastAfrican newspaper on February 13, 2021.