Ngima Thogo, beyond all doubts that one may have about his art, is an illustrator of the fatal, fairy gaze, which makes everything seem beautiful, necessary, somehow enchanting, sometimes even too beautiful. With harshness, lyrical obsessiveness, he performs cutting operations. What are his paintings of him, in reality, if not an extraordinarily documentary glance on his own narratives, on the narrative machines that he puts on stage? It is a pure trap to chase Thogo as a narrator, and we can see precisely from these subjects that they are not the story of a generation but a sort of implosion of an image, an image that at the moment could not be told otherwise.

And the fascinating, very touching thing is to find a sort of unique, very tender form: the body of desire, the body of these young women and men who are scattered in his art, like little stars. There is an absolute dispossession. It is as if there was only that, with a gesture that is senile and very young at the same time. There is the relentless attempt to pull out a shape or at least to capture it as it evolves. And these glimpses show it, which suddenly show us images so concrete, so physical, that they immediately turn over into pure abstractness. But the result is not so difficult nor mysterious to interpret, Ngima Thogo combines the complication with the simplicity of the thing. Good vision.

Ngima Thogo lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.