Time for Culinary Delight, Visual Feast

Kenya Mon 18-10-2010

Time for Culinary Delight, Visual Feast
By Frank Whalley | theeastafrican.co.ke

Food and fine art, or art and fine food for that matter, have long been happy tablemates. There are cafes in Paris and Zurich lined with the work of artists now famous — Picasso and Derain, Vlaminck and Modigliani… who, when impoverished painters or refugees, paid for their meals and drinks with a sketch or something from the studio.

Beatrice Wanjiku's painting on exhibition at the Le Rustique | Image by Andrew Njoroge

Restaurants also tend to be places where the reasonably affluent meet. If you can afford to eat out, the reasoning goes, then you have probably got enough spare cash to buy a picture.

And so the practice grew of using the walls to showcase art for sale. Have a crepe: Buy some art. In Nairobi the tradition continues apace.

The Talisman in Karen, where a show of watercolours by Sophie Walbeoffe — elephants, ostrichs and other wildlife — has just ended, is one example.

Beatrice Wanjiku's exhibition at the Le Rustique | Image by Andrew Njoroge

Another is Le Rustique in the capital’s General Mathenge Drive. The exhibitions there are curated by Xavier Verhoest, himself an artist, who tries to ensure his clients receive a sympathetic showing among the tables and chairs.

Currently Le Rustique is home to a group of paintings by Beatrice Wanjiku, one of the crop of young painters setting the pace in East Africa. It’s on until November 10. But more of her in a minute. One of the problems of exhibiting in a restaurant is that the walls are coloured to enhance the food, rather than the pictures.

In the serene surroundings of a gallery this can be controlled by repainting the walls to suit each show. In a restaurant this is not practical — and on top of that, the artist has to compete for attention against a riot of bright tablecloths, napkins, waiters’ uniforms, cushions and heaven knows what else.

Beatrice Wanjiku's exhibition at the Le Rustique | Image by Andrew Njoroge

The result is a random spattering of colours, rather as though you are looking at a pizza on a plate. Which half the time, you probably are. There is an upside however. And that is that the surroundings of a restaurant — give or take a waitress or two — are probably a fair match for the average home.

Most of us choose comfort and colour over the Spartan surroundings of a minimalist exhibition space, so you do at least get some sense of what the pictures might look like on your own wall.

Beatrice Wanjiku's exhibition at the Le Rustique | Image by Andrew Njoroge

However, the paintings of Beatrice Wanjiku offered at Le Rustique would, I have to say, look far better in the cool spaces of a gallery than on the restaurant wall.

Verhoest has done his best, wisely limiting her to 10 pictures, which at least gives each the space it needs. These are dense, many-layered paintings — busy, busy, busy — and the multiplicity of images and references each contains generates an initial noise which needs room in which to subside, so the pictures can be read calmly; as intelligently as they have been created.

Beatrice Wanjiku's exhibition at the Le Rustique | Image by Andrew Njoroge

Three of the finest pictures at Le Rustique were snapped up on the opening night by one collector who, I understand, intends to hang them side by side, turning them into a triptych.

Posted By: Diana Achieng

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