Four Artists In One Day

Kenya Thu 24-02-2005

Four Artists In One Day
By Aarti wa Njoroge

It is like walking into a reverie. That is how Kamal Shah describes his own work, but it could apply to any of the art currently being exhibited at Le Rustique restaurant in Nairobi.

Curator Xavier Verhoest has brought together four Kenyan-based artists with disparate cultural backgrounds using often vibrant colours and styles (some more abstract than others). Forget the fact that this is art made in Kenya. Rather, one common thread in all the paintings is that you are obliged to pause to think about both the aesthetic impression and underlying message that the artist wants to give.

Khartoum-born Salah Ammar uses two dimensions (paintings) to convey three-dimensional motion. After concentrating on Untitled for a while, you see how bold yellow brushstrokes mask and shape the underlying colours into three women, one of whom may be dancing, another bending and a third one carrying pots on her head.

Kenya’s Simon Muriithi has been painting "since [he] came to earth". He wants to convey happiness in his paintings, as an antidoteSimon Muriithi to the disaster-laden world according to the news.

He says he cannot paint more than two pictures without a flower. One of his trademarks does seem to be the use of flowers in place of eyes – maybe as a way of telling us to look at the world in a more positive way.

He is constantly planting and re-planting flowers at home.Another trademark is his painted and sometimes carved frames, which he started making when a collector asked him to frame a canvas he had bought a year earlier. So, now, Simon’s art extends beyond the border of his painting

After studying at an art school in Asmara, Fitsum Berne moved to Kenya. His paintings on exhibit focus on life outside Nairobi. As he put it, he is more interested in people in the bush than the bush itself. In a country that is undergoing change, his work will become a snapshot in time.

I am curious to know if Kamal Shah has ever considered transforming the colours and prints in his paintings ‘back’ into textiles, his original career. Indeed, I would happily wrap any of the canvases on display round me.

The opening was not just a meeting of works of art, it was also a meeting of Nairobi’s cultural backbone. A theatre director who talked about setting an Indian play in a Maasai context, with Maasai costumes and names, a publisher who battled to get Kenyan educationalists to see the value of comic books, a few writers, the editor of the BBC Africa Service…

Anyone in any doubt on Nairobi’s cultural renaissance can only have left inspired.

Posted By: AfricanColours

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