When
Boniface Maina made his move out of Nairobi, back home to Nanyuki, in 2017, nobody
knew how long he would be gone.
Having been
a co-founder of Brush tu Artists Collective with David Thuku and Michael
Musyoka, he would always be a Brush tu artist, no matter where he was based;
that was certain. But other than that, no one could tell when he’d be back or
what direction his art would take.
Despite
being very much a member of the Brush tu family, he had always had his own
singular style of operating. As he put it in Susan Githuku’s book, Visual
Voices, he had always been experimental in his approach to his art. He was
always open to reinventing himself stylistically. So, when we heard he was
having his first solo exhibition in a while at Red Hill Gallery in early April,
BD Life was keen to be there on time.
We had been
to numerous exhibitions featuring Boni’s art in the past. He had one solo
exhibition at the now defunct Art Space in Chiromo run by Wambui Collemore, and
countless group shows, like ones he had at the Russian Embassy, another in Lamu
at the Peponi Hotel, and many others at Brush tu, first when it initially
opened in Buru Buru Phase one and just the trio were exhibiting, and another
when the group moved literally across the street and into a house so they could
accommodate more up-and-coming artists who wanted to work closely with the
troika of Boni, Thuku and Musyoka[ms1] .
The
collective was growing so fast that they had to tear down a wall so as to
enlarge the space and accommodate still more artists. It was a timely move
since a donor had stepped in to enable Brush tu to have art residencies that
proved to attract a Pan African set of artists to come and work for several
months at Brush tu.
It's also
when the collective started having monthly Open Houses, where Boni’s art
featured alongside a whole new generation of Kenyan painters, sculptors, photographers,
and printmakers. It was also when we finally saw women joining the collective,
and bringing new perspectives to the group. At every show one would find Boni
taking different approaches to his work.
Most
recently, before he went home for many months, Boni introduced us to a new
character in his art. He was quite unlike the Smokey character who has never
quite revealed himself through his maker, Paul Onditi. But then, it seemed he
was meant to walk us through his encounters with dystopic worlds to witness
them first hand with Smokey.
Boni’s
nameless fellow seemed to have a more developed sense of personality and
identity. His sole reason for joining
Boni’s artistic ‘ecosystem’ seems to be for expressing Boni’s sense of freedom:
freedom to relax, to watch a sunset, or to leap into new realms of the unknown.
And while his man seems to be apolitical, blissful despite the dystopic blight
many have to face every day, Boni has chosen to peel off the skin of his
character, so that his identity could transcend the problems of race,
ethnicity, and even age. His man is clothed only in his muscular form.
We expected
to find him at Red Hill when Bon’s show opened. He was there and still a
representative of the artist’s free spirit. But the show, entitled ‘Delicate
Densities’ seemed to be more about Boni’s experimentations with multimedia.
He had
always loved drawing and that is what inspired him to come to Nairobi to attend
first, the YMCA National Training Centre followed by another degree in painting
and drawing from BIFA, the Buru Buru Institute of Fine Art.
But now, in
this exhibition, Boni outdoes himself, infusing moods and moments into a whole
range of materials. He works with everything from bleach and ink on canvas and
special watercolor paper. He also works with various paints and brushes on
wooden planks on which he also etches. He even takes up carpentry to design and
assemble some of his most ambitious works which are more like sculptures than
three dimensional paintings. And while the exhibition also includes a number of
works from earlier periods of his artistic evolution, they also reveal just how
far Boni has come since he first arrived in Nairobi in the early days of the
new millennium.
Ultimately,
it’s his ongoing exercise of experimentation and creative curiosity that fuel
our own appreciation of Boniface Maina.
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