There are few artists who can portray Kenya and its people as Michael Soi can.

His humorous, at times sarcastic look at the society of one of the most vibrant countries and at the same time in unstable equilibrium between development and congenital social defects, finds a happy outlet in painting that winks at pop art, comics and surrealism, with a clear message: satire is not a denunciation, but a way of looking inside oneself with disenchantment and without losing the desire to laugh about it.

We met Soi in his studio-garden near the centre of Nairobi.

Here, the artist, in his early 50s, not only has his workshop, but also hosts other artists from the capital, grows herbs and vegetables and at the centre of the creative space is a large barbecue that becomes the hub of meetings, discussions and creativity under the banner of enjoying life not without a critical spirit and a lucid look at the present.

"Beyond my works," he tells us, showing his recent production, "I believe that my main work is to document the real country in recent years. A kind of diary that can one day be used to say - ah, that's what was happening in and around Nairobi - Basically, ever since the middle class was formed in Kenya, it is evident that men are becoming dominated by sex and alcohol, and women are cultivating their power of glamour and trying to monetise it.

In the joyfulness of curvaceous female bodies, fatal gazes, pronounced lips and false eyelashes, there is the vicious and closed circle of money eating money in a rich but corrupt country.

The success of the 'documentary filmmaker with a paintbrush' Michael came about ten years ago with the saga 'China Loves Africa', in which the money-neocolonialism binomial is described with irresistible grotesque cartoonish strokes, through the usual keys of interpretation. Due to the success of his social critique, in the following years he exhibited in Japan, South Korea, Ghana, Denmark, Switzerland, South Africa, the UK, Nigeria, Ethiopia and also participated in group exhibitions in the USA and the Netherlands.

From there, Soi's brush has been identified internationally as the pen of a scathing writer (along the lines of Binyavanga Wainaina, who passed away prematurely) or an independent columnist of the kind that this country, alas, sorely lacks, not least because they would risk their lives as bloggers who were gaining too much popularity in the past have done. 

After the insinuating language of the Chinese dragon, came vignettes alluding to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and amidst the undressed beauties and bottles of Tusker, the faces of Putin and Biden mingle with those of wealthy Kenyans who eventually share, without jealousy, the same woman named Kenya.

'The most important decisions in this country are made in nightclubs,' wrote James Ellroy of 1960s America. Surely those who have partitioned and sold out Kenya in recent years have frequented a few nightclubs in Nairobi.

'This is not a country that is used to social satire, but neither is it used to costume one,' Soi explains, 'Often there are people who ask me why I take pleasure in making fun of my countrymen. They don't understand that it is by looking at and understanding our flaws, but also by joking about them, that we can better understand our society and develop the antibodies so that we are not subjugated by those who take advantage of our weaknesses to serve their own interests'.

The last big picture in front of us, as we talk about contemporary literature, African economics, illustrations, Italian footballers of the 1990s and good food, shows in the foreground the graces of a stripteaser who has before her a crowd of men dazzled by so much spectacle, whose ebullish, voluptuous gaze says it all.

"To tell the story, you have to live it first," one of Kenya's greatest writers, Meja Mwangi, who first narrated the hidden folds of River Road's vibrant 'Nairobbery', where in nightclubs, filmmakers, poets, thugs, politicians, British drunks, women of ill repute, talented artists and unscrupulous entrepreneurs met indifferently, told me.

'It's true, if you don't frequent these places you can't know where a part of the country is going,' Soi admits. 'I sometimes spend evenings there with friends and enjoy the other spectacle, the one that then often animates my paintings.

Provocative, allusive, funny: these are the works that have given him fame and visibility, but Michael has not stopped at the commercial logic of reproducing himself endlessly. He has embarked on other themes and parallel serial works, from the famous 1970s wig-wearing girls, to the Lamu fishermen, to the most recent in the pipeline and most visionary: a work laden with metaphors about women heroines and 'queens' of a nation that has forgotten the matriarchal society of yesteryear and has to deal, like Italy, with a worryingly increasing number of feminicides.

He doesn't stop and paints everything that comes his way: stools, benches, walls, bags and purses.
"Actually my idea was not to create gadgets, in fact the first handbags were framed, precisely to differentiate the work of art from possible commercial use and merchandising".

But what in Kenya today does not have a commercial purpose?
What is not for sale?
Fortunately, in Michael Soi's case, so is irony, intelligence and a conscious love for his land.