At Redhill Art Gallery, artist Onyis Martin's new exhibition "Too Many Words" presents an extensive exploration of how societies communicate through visual, verbal, and everyday elements. The show moves beyond traditional mixed-media collage by using posters, paint, and sculptural surfaces as the primary medium for recording and challenging urban experiences. The exhibition challenges viewers to consider not only what they observe, but how meaning is created in the space between seeing and speaking.
Martin, who has long been recognized for his skill in mixed media, has once again centered this collection of work around materials that bring Nairobi's streets to life. His collage-based approach, which began in childhood, has remained consistent in materials while evolving in specifics. "My work looks at time in the sense of the interactions of people and nature and the relationship that people have in the specific pockets of time. I have always been a mixed media artist, from the first collages I did when I was six years old to the present," Martin explains.
In "Too Many Words," posters serve as the main tool through which Martin examines power, restriction, aspiration, and consumption. Collected from Nairobi's walls, these posters function as social indicators, showing what communities want, fear, or are told to follow. "In my exhibition, I talk about movement in terms of how human beings movements have been restricted or determined," he notes. "When on a wall, there is written no idling, you are already being restricted whether you are an idler or not." This observation leads to a broader critique about who creates the rules for public spaces and who they target.
The posters also expose the city's complex consumption patterns. "What people are advertising in a particular area tells you what people are interested in consuming," Martin says. By combining political campaign graphics, club advertisements, and common witch doctor posters, Martin creates a visual timeline of changing public interests from 2014 to the present. The contradictions within this consumption, particularly people's denial of using witch-doctor services despite the abundance of their posters, become part of his investigation. "There has to be a return," he points out, referring to the hidden economies that complicate Nairobi's urban stories.
The central concept of "Too Many Words" is a metaphorical wall that contains every attempt at mark-making, from graffiti to children's drawings to commercial messages. It represents a wall where language builds up faster than it can be understood. "To be able to describe what you saw doesn't necessarily create in mind the picture of what you saw," Martin explains. "It is in this gap between verbal and visual that I am staying." The work focuses less on direct communication and more on the uncertainty of being unable to fully explain what any mark means.
Viewers are invited into this uncertain zone where meaning is overwhelming, disputed, or simply lost. In the exhibition, mixed media is used with sculptural purpose. Posters form the surface layer, while spray paint and collage additions create depth, and canvas is reworked to imitate the fragmented, multiply-written surfaces of the city. These choices reflect the physical nature of urban mark-making, including torn posters, painted-over messages, and traces competing for attention. Martin's new work feels more structurally bold, as if the surfaces themselves have become living records of interference and renewal.
Martin's early years at the Mukuru Art and Craft School quietly support his technical range. "Mukuru was set up in such a way that it was the older artists who were guiding us – you were teacher and student and vice versa to the artist standing next to you in the studio," he recalls. This peer-to-peer learning created the collaborative, cross-disciplinary approach that continues to shape his work. "Technically, I am constantly shifting from one medium to the other while retaining a specific," he adds.
These personal details matter because they help explain his current practice, including its thoroughness, material complexity, and natural understanding of urban visual language. Although Martin has been active for more than ten years, "Too Many Words" carries the urgency and freshness of a practice based on observation and social criticism. His themes of freedom, movement, technology, and consumerism are explored not through speeches but through the material culture of the city itself. The posters, stains, textures, and fragments create a visual study of society that is both personal and wide-ranging.
Ultimately, the exhibition studies excess: too many signs, too many instructions, too many desires, too many competing stories. Yet Martin's work doesn't try to resolve these tensions. Instead, it captures the lived noise of modern society and the impossibility of containing it in clear speech. "Too Many Words" is, appropriately, a show that speaks most clearly through its silences – in the spaces where language fails and images take control.
