Kamwathi experiments and innovates using many of the techniques in his artistic toolbox, from drawing, painting, printing, and stenciling to airbrushing and blending subtle hues into his works.
Kamwathi’s art is inscrutable. Others simply describe it as surrealist. He works on various levels of meaning, made apparent in one of the most complex, colourful, and engaging paintings in the show.
Peterson Kamwathti’s current art exhibition entitled P(a)lace, which opened last weekend at One Off Gallery in Nairobi quickly revealed the artist had not slacked off during the Covid-10 curfew.
On the contrary, he used the lockdown to reflect on his own experience and interrogate concepts of time and space (or place) in the broadest philosophical sense.
In this body of work, Kamwathi, one of Kenya’s most acclaimed conceptual artists, examines time and space at both the individual and collective levels as well as at the local and the global.
And he does so in ways that are inventive yet disturbing as he taps into inexplicable feelings of aloneness or even angst that some may have felt during those difficult days.
Kamwathi also experiments and innovates using many of the techniques in his artistic toolbox, from drawing, painting, printing, and stenciling to airbrushing and blending subtle hues into his works.
He also employs a broad mix of media, including charcoal, coloured pencils, carbon paper, and pastels as he works his way through a complex set of concepts, layer by layer. He even works with maps to interrogate the notions of boundaries, borders, confinement as they have existed in Kenya’s present and the past.
A few of Kamwathi’s ‘experiments’ appear in the exhibition as ‘Studies’ for the larger work, ‘Dunia Wiki Hii II’. One is of a man doing a handstand on a pair of skulls. In another, the man does his handstand atop a big buffalo skull, which the artist tells BDLife is significant. That the living buffalo is commonly seen as a tourist attraction, and if manifest in art gets classified as mere ‘souvenir art’.
Kamwathi’s ‘Beacon II’ at the gallery. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU | NMG
“But no one can say the same about a buffalo skull,” Kamwathi says. “It carries different significance altogether,” he adds with a smile.
“I don’t paint,’ he tells one collector of his art. “I assemble.”
This is a way of saying his art is layered both in terms of his techniques as well as in the meanings infused into every layer.
Kamwathi’s art is inscrutable. Others simply describe it as surrealist. He works on various levels of meaning, made apparent in one of the most complex, colourful, and engaging paintings in the show. In ‘Frames of Reference II’, he pays attention to both the individual and the group, each confined to their portion of the painting, their portion being delineated with specific lines of confinement that shoot out across the painting in geometric style.
The piece uses specific images as symbols of time. From pre-colonial times, there is a section devoted to fossilised rocks like ones found in archeological digs near Lake Magadi.
In another section of the work is a group of squatting individuals who might be migrants or even Mau Mau detainees. The ambiguity of the image is part of what disturbs. Then just next to the squatters is a chess piece.
Kamwathi’s Frames of Reference II’ at the gallery. PHOTO | MARGARETTA WA GACHERU | NMG
It’s the Queen, a reference (he suggests) to the Queen who presided over the British Empire when Kenya suddenly got confined by colonial boundaries. Then in the foreground of the work is a boy doing a backward stretch, his fingers just below another layer of meaning in which a woman bends over as if to almost touch her toes or carry an invisible burden.
In all of Kamwathi’s works in P(a)laces, the issue of confinement is apparent, whether the individual is standing alone on a pedestal as in ‘Beacon III’, or bending over his separate carpet as in ‘Frame of Reference II’ or squatting as in ‘Untitled/Noble Savage’. In almost every work, there is an awkwardness to the individual’s form, apart from the acrobats who seem to have some control over their body movement.
There is one of his paintings that suggests the possibility of freedom from the entrapments expressed either as chicken wire or cobwebs or road barracks, all of which are visible in one or the other of his works. And that is of a baby boy standing alone, aloof, above a mountain top, as if he was floating and free.
Yet when I express curiosity about the upside-down table above the little boy’s head, Kamwathi admits the table could also be seen as a confining object capable of limiting the boy’s freedom of movement.
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