Paintings that Wield Across Time: The Fictional Potraits of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Words by Camila Ponce Hernandez
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a British-Ghanaian artist who seeks out her imagery within a myriad of observations – found images, memories, literature, or the history of painting. Her large, figurative oil canvases depict fictional Black subjects painted rapidly with a measure of spontaneity and improvisation. Generating this powerful atmosphere in the very moment of creation makes it possible for every subject depicted in her oil-drenched renditions of Black subjectivity to find a kinetic agency that lifts them from the stasis of the canvas. In Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings, this improvised soul becomes the prototype from which agency itself is allowed to be traced.
“No Twilight Too Mighty”
Bathing in brittle, uncertain hues displaced from any temporal reference, her work is situated at the intersection between a past, present and future context. Although, sometimes, amid this sober colouration, splashes of yellow, pink and vivid blues abound, all tempered by the many snowdrop gaps of unpainted canvas, like floral accents in an untamed garden. In this way, Yiadom-Boakye captures the subtleties of human personality with several confident brushstrokes, a painterly narrative that would take a novelist thousands of words to achieve. However, her works bear no identifying titles; a dancing girl mid-arabesque is known only as “Light Of The Lit Wick,” the gentleman with a cat on his orange turtleneck, “In Lieu Of Keen Virtue,” and the bizarre man with his hands on his knees, “A Cage For The Love.” Unlike the titles accompanying contemporary artworks, which often provide a kind of conceptual scaffolding or a weak punchline, Yiadom-Boakye’s titles act as accompanying poems, ‘an extra mark in the paintings.’ As such, there is no wall text in her exhibition Fly in League with the Night; nothing to distract oneself with. In this way, Yiadom-Boakye seems to offer a soft space for joy and beauty, but one that is clearly visceral and separate to me. I am not a part of these paintings.
They open to me like sun-glazed windows, yet the figures inhabit their own space and suggest that they will continue on in their private worlds long after I have finished looking. I am here, looking, but my gaze does not activate the paintings. They are infinite, expansive, complete.
“6pm Madeira”
At the heart of Yiadom-Boakye’s work is her exploration of how a narrative can be imposed on artistic images, a notion discussed by author Zadie Smith, who claims that artists must grapple with “the canvas [as] the text.” In the same way that a story is crafted through the arrangement of words, a painting’s meaning – or that of art more broadly – is determined by the elements that are purposefully included or excluded. Akin to an anthology of short stories, the subjects appear to coexist in their distinct yet collaborative chiaroscuro climates. To the invisible sitters, the audience seems incidental. Their stares, though at times muted and impressionistic, are depicted with boldness and audacity, reaffirming the visual experience of looking back.
In the most revered traditional European art forms, oil portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye centres on Black personhood, reorienting its mask-clad subjectivity that lingered on the periphery of European artistic output. Intimate and enigmatic, our encounter with Yiadom-Boakye’s renditions of the Black subject feels like being face-to-face with a familiar stranger. Zadie Smith has discussed the racial politics underlying the reemergence of figurative painting:
“Many critics have noted that this return to ‘painterly capacity’ is particularly notable in Black artists, and, strange indeed, that they should be the gateway – the permission needed – to return to the figurative, to the possibility of virtuosity! Why this might be the case is a fraught question, and Yiadom-Boakye, in her interview with Beckwith, proves herself slyly aware of its implications: ‘How many times I heard from someone saying, ‘You’re lucky. You were born with a subject.’ Well, isn’t everyone?”
Nevertheless, Yiadom-Boakye's creative practice appears to resist categorisation. Her subjects’ blackness is explored and dignified by a means of technical vibrancy, of celebratory spontaneity. A genuine discovery of paint and its self-realising potential. Without sacrificing figuration, therefore, Yiadom-Boakye seeks to liberate her subjects from technique. For, in her own words, history will always “serv[e] as a resource. But the bigger draw for me is the power that painting can wield across time.”
