EAST AFRICAN ARTISTS CONNECT WITH ART HISTORY

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (10.10.23) When Veronica Paradinas Duro first came to Kenya in 2014, she was an architect, not a curator and founder of one of the country’s signature art galleries. But as she’d studied both fine art and architecture at University of Madrid, she was conversant in both fields. Ultimately, her love of art won the day. NavitArt Gallery was born by the end of 2016, once she had traveled around Nairobi and met many local artists whom she felt deserved more exposure and appreciation than what they currently had. But from the outset, Veronica also made a point of seeing beyond encumbering boundaries. She’s visited artists from all over East Africa, many of whom are in her current exhibition, entitled ‘Beyond this face 2 – Echoes of the past’. “There are 32 artists in the exhibition, half of whom are Kenyan. The rest are from Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda,” Veronica told BD Life. But numbers are not the issue in this remarkable show. What is are the correlations that she has made between the contemporary artists and those of centuries past. Questioned as to why she had felt compelled to compare contemporary African artists and those of the post, Veronica was quick to respond. “To me, art is universal, but the history of art hasn’t yet included Africans’ art or art reflective of their point of view,” she explained. But that is only part of what her ambitious exhibition aims to do. Having studied the historical movements of art, from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance up to Surrealism, Graffiti street art, and Modern Black Figuration, Veronica has tried to situate all 32 artists’ works with a comparable painter from the past. In some cases, one can easily see how Michael Soi’s art and that of Andy Warhol have much in common and how both can be correlated within the Pop Art movement. One can just as easily see how Ehoodi Kichapi and Jean-Michel Basquiat can fit well together within the Graffiti art movement. “What I have done is not to say that one artwork is better than another, but give them a place within the broader story of the history of art,” Veronica said. At this stage, one can see that her knowledge of both the African and the Western worlds of art is encyclopedic. For how else could she have recalled that one of Boniface Maina’s more recent works just happened to have comparable features to the Spanish artist. Salvador Dali. I have always felt that Shabu Mwangi had a lot in common with the British painter Francis Bacon. But having recently seen an exhibition of Leo Mativo, I couldn’t imagine why she would have also correlated Leo’s art with Bacon’s. But then I saw how Leo’s art had radically changed since he began working closely with Shabu and cultivating some of his style and darker approach to painting. In fact, Veronica doesn’t pass judgement on anybody’s way of painting. Instead, she takes their art at face value, looking at artists who either share comparable color palettes, or subject matter or even comparable positioning of the subject seated as their portrait was being painted. The last consideration is one of the reasons Veronica saw so many correlations between Nedia Were’s ‘Mukhana Shiong’o’ (Beautiful Lady) and Leonardo di Vinci’s beautiful lady, ‘Mona Lisa’. Both women are seated in a three-quarter frontal position, both have an imaginary landscape behind them and both have a classically enigmatic smile. What I find most thrilling about this exhibition is that although it might seem absurd to look for commonalities among artists of the past and present, Veronica has curated this show in her own unique and unconventional way. She has sought to share African art from a different perspective, one that can give their art an open door into an international art world that can’t help being surprised by the beauty, vibrancy and diversity of African art. There’s a 42-page catalog that one needs to see if for no other reason than to read the captions in order to understand how for instance, Patrick Kinuthia could be correlated with the Fauvist movement of the late 19th century, and how Peter Elungat IS appropriately classified as a magical realist. Even the way the curator found a compatibility between the 19th century German artist, Casper David Friedrich and Paul Onditi’s solitary figure of Smokey is a marvel. And even the way she appreciates how Coster Ojwang’s portraits are as stunning as Claude Monet’s portrait of himself. GravitArt is based at Peponi Gardens in Westlands.