EAST AFRICAN ARTISTS CONNECT WITH ART HISTORY

By Margaretta wa Gacheru (posted october 24, 2023) 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 Kenya 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. It’s the correlations that she has made between contemporary artists and those of centuries past. Asked why she felt compelled to make the comparisons, Veronica was quick to respond. “To me, art is universal, but the history of art hasn’t yet included African art or art reflecting an African perspective,” she explained. But that is only part of what her ambitious exhibition aims to achieve. Having studied the historical movements of art, from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance up to Surrealism, and Modern Black Figuration, Veronica has tried to correlate all 32 contemporary African artists with painters from previous periods in time. In some cases, one can see, for instance, how the Egyptian painter Souad Abdel Rasoul has much in common with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo since both are women and both share an element of surrealism in their art. One can also see why she links Michael Soi’s art with that of Andy Warhol since both could correlate with the modern Pop Art movement. The same holds true with Kenya’s Ehoodi Kichapi and the African American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. “What I have done is not to say that one artwork is better than another, but give [East African artists] a place within the broader story of the history of art,” Veronica said. It is an ambitious and imaginative project, especially when she correlates Eritrean artist Fitsum Berhe Woldelibanos with the acclaimed French painter Henri Matisse, or draws a connection between Sudanese artist Eltayeb Dawelbeit and Marisol Escobar in Assemblage Art. At this stage, one can see that her knowledge of both the African and Western history of art is encyclopedic. For how else could she have recalled that one of Boniface Maina’s more recent works had comparable features to a surrealist painting by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali. Or that Shabu Mwangi’s art shares comparable features with the British painter Francis Bacon. 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 similar positioning of the subject seated as their portrait was being painted. The last consideration is one of the reasons Veronica saw 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 gives 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.