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..
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.
This is also
when the collective started having monthly Open Houses where Boni’s art was
featured along with a whole new generation of painters and sculptors appearing,
some Kenyan, others international. This was also when we finally see women like
Sebawali Sio and Bushkimani Moira joining the collective, and bringing new
perspectives to the group. At every show one would find Boni taking on
different approaches.
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 firsthand like 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 our character,
so that his identity transcends the problems of race, ethnicity, and even age. His
man is clothed in his muscular form.
We expected
to find him at Red Hill Gallery when his show opened recently. He was there and still refreshingly 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
show, Boni outdoes himself, infusing moods and moments into a whole range of intersecting elements.
He works with everything from bleach and ink on canvas and special watercolor
paper. He also works with 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 the pleasure the artist finds in experimenting in the arts has been a
constant that has led to our ongoing appreciation of Boniface Maina.
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