LINCOLN MWANGI’S VISUAL VOCABULARY TRANSLATES INTO A STRIKING SOLO SHOW

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (drafted 27 April 2021)

Water boarding, that infamous practice of interrogation and torture practiced widely during the Iraq War, made a profound impression on Lincoln Mwangi.

He was still in his early teens the first time he saw it on CNN. But it made a lasting impression on this sensitive young Kenyan artist, according to the curator of his current solo exhibition, Veronica Paradinas Duro, CEO of Gravitart Gallery.

“He was disturbed that he couldn’t see the identity of the one being tortured, but he could feel the man’s emotions. That realization has shaped the way he’s worked ever since,” she told BD Life.

“Lincoln is committed to conveying emotions and feelings through his art. He aims to communicate the unseen more than the seen,” she adds.

Her explanation is in response to my query as to why the faces of Mwangi’s characters are invariably veiled. The archetypal animals, the goat and egret, that often appear in the 40 paintings in his show are free from that encumbrance. Could it be that the creatures embody innocence and freedom while the veil conveys a sense of separation and concealment?

Veronica, who’s an artist in her own right, suggests his works can have many interpretations. But the collection which is up until mid-May in her Peponi Gardens gallery, comes with Mwangi’s own esoteric code and symbolic language. The code serves as a kind of key enabling one to appreciate the broader significance of the artist’s creative concerns. It also allows one to see the way even the title of his exhibition, “A Painted Book of Life, Time, and Feeling” signifies the unity of all the paintings.

Without Mwangi’s inventive code, one will miss out on how to translate his visual language into meanings that make sense. For instance, the egret and the goat have feminine and masculine qualities respectively. One further signifies the sky while the other the ground. Colors also carry symbolic value, be they red, blue, black, or white. And the person who recurrently appears in Mwangi’s paintings is Wanjiru, who is his feminine symbol of every woman. Finally, the other image that stands out in Mwangi’s work is the mango tree, which is said to symbolize growth and shelter for the other characters in his book of life.

“All of these images are meant to be archetypal,” says Veronica several days after the show’s opening on April 11^th. She adds that Mwangi intentionally keeps Wanjiru veiled in order not to have us focus on her individuality, but rather to see her in more “universal” terms, particularly in terms of the feelings he aims to affect through his art.

So when one sees these symbols set against a neutral backdrop, what’s significant is not just the delicate details of his egret or the draping of Wanjiru’s gown, which we can see in works like ‘Decisions’, ‘Anointing a Harvest’ and ‘Fire and Ground’. It’s the unspoken interaction going on between the characters that he wants you, the audience, to contemplate.

I especially like his goat portraits since Mwangi allows them to have individuality and character unlike his anonymous Wanjiru whose emotions feel ambiguous to me. Ironically, it is his goats which convey a depth of feeling that allows one to see them as conscious beings. The three portraits of Wanjiru that succeed at being contemplative are his ‘Silence I’, ‘Silence II’ and ‘Pleasure’. In these three, her body language communicates more than the stoical standing Wanjiru who is in a work like ‘Changes’ which is made with mixed media on linen. His other mixed media works are either on canvas or paper.

The other innovation about Mwangi’s show, apart from his original language, is the three-dimensional virtual exhibition that one can find on the Gravitart website. Veronica, being an architect as well as an artist, works regularly constructing virtual 3D structures for her clients. So it wasn’t difficult for her to transfer Mwangi’s ‘Book’ of paintings onto a brand new gallery platform that enables one to click around corners and see the entire show, including clicks that will give you the full details of each painting and another click to decide whether you want to buy the work or not. The price range of his art runs from less than Sh30,000 to more than half a million. Then again, a collector might want to buy the whole book which would pose a problem since several have already gone. But then, everything’s negotiable.

Mwangi, a BIFA graduate, can be found at his studio at Brush Tu in Buruburu.