Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Like the figure in Liberation Jumpsuit II (2008), there is to all Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects a sense of self-possessed ease. Much is made of the blackness of the imagined people she paints, though the artist suggests she is less interested in politics of representation than she is in paint’s formal freedoms and limitations. To critic and curator Hilton Als, Yiadom-Boakye represents “black society, not as it was affected or shaped by the white world, but as it exists unto itself.” The artist concurs: “Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore, I’ve never felt the need to explain its presence in the work anymore than I’ve felt the need to explain my presence in the world, however often I’m asked.” To Yiadom-Boakye, the gesture is less one of inviting people of colour into art history’s canon, than one of announcing that “we’ve always been here.” In the shadowed darkness of their compositions, the artist’s characters are more often contemplative, at rest, regarding one another or the viewer with conviviality, or staring off, beyond the edges of the canvas, into the unseen. Here, a lone figure dressed in red stands with hands on hips – relaxed and unconcerned – looking towards something out of sight.
b.1977, London
“Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s people push themselves forward, into the imagination – as literary characters do,” author Zadie Smith says of the artist’s figures, “surely, in part, because these are not really portraits. They have no models, no sitters. They are character studies of people who don’t exist.” As writer and painter, Yiadom-Boakye is less concerned with reality’s verisimilitude than the affective qualities figuration affords. Her enigmatic titles, such as In Lieu of Keen Virtue (2017) and Tie the Temptress to the Trojan (2016), are to the artist a finishing varnish – neither descriptive of their respective works nor prescriptive of their readings – each a part of a compositional whole. Her portraits, if indeed they can be called by that name, echo the Dutch golden age genre of tronie, those paintings of imagined people that extend beyond individual likeness to portray states of being and mood made manifest. “Is this a gallery of somebodies or nobodies?” curator Okwui Enwezor asked of Yiadom-Boakye’s 2010 exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The answer, perhaps, is anybodies; men and women of colour, all lithe, set against dark, uncertain backgrounds. Described in hurried brushstrokes, the artist’s compositions are more often painted in a single day. And while her own preoccupations are distinctly formal, to the viewer, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings offer a compelling play between fact and fiction. “The deeper beguilement” – Smith again – “is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realised figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative.”