LYNETTE YIADOM BOAKYE

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye 
 brilliant Black British artist

Born in 1977, London, lives and works in London

 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 'A Life To Die For' (2012), oil on canvas. Courtesy: Corvi-Mora London, Jack Shainman Gallery New York

‘Any Number of Preoccupations’ (2010)

Lynette Yiadom Boakye, 'Oyster' (2012), oil on canvas, 180 cm x 100 cm
Courtesy: Corvi-Mora, London and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Detail of 'Songs In The Head' (2012), oil on canvas, 180 cm x 200 cm. 
Courtesy: Corvi-Mora, London and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Whose oyster is this world?

by Orlando Reade

"I am travelling on a night bus through the university town in which I am resident, and as we wind through the mid-winter mist which descended just after midnight, a conversation begins with the only other passenger.

We look at some books of Sufi poetry I have borrowed from the library and he starts to tell me about his childhood in Iran, his Islamic upbringing, and how he lost his faith when he started to study theoretical physics. He doesn’t consider himself a practicing Muslim, but often still prays, to a God, and has started meditation. After one intense meditation, an Indian technique whose name I don’t catch, he experienced what is called – his face looms up, across the bus aisle, close to mine, his eyebrows are sincerely raised – astral projection: his mind became free from his body; did not altogether depart from it, but remained, like a balloon rubbing up against the ceiling, ’not far, but far‘. He is no longer certain that physics, the science of bodies, has an answer for everything.

There is a history of uncertainty – theorised for mathematics by Werner Heisenberg, scattered as words across a white page by Stéphane Mallarmé and the poets of free verse, drawn out in the indeterminacies of modernist abstraction and reclaimed for portraiture by Francis Bacon – the power and significance of which are newly realised in the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, in whose paintings uncertainty is manifest as a dialectic of light and darkness. The artist, born to British-Ghanaian parents in 1977, has produced a body of work more interesting – to this viewer at least – than any other painter of her generation. She has won various lucrative prizes, has high-profile exhibitions in New York, London, and Cape Town, and her paintings now sell for many thousands of pounds. This success is unquestionable according to the logic of contemporary art, but her paintings guard an uncertainty which troubles our attention, prohibits easy conclusions about what they mean, and may prove to be critical to the work’s unsettling power. Consider the painting ‘Oyster‘ (above):

The subject of this painting is a body presented to the viewer as an arrangement of dark areas wrapped in the brushstrokes of a whitish dressing-gown. The body is delineated thickly against the dirty off-whites of the back wall and floor, an almost crude pastiche of the smooth backgrounds of Velazquez or Manet. The body, perched on the edge of a lush red armchair in a dressing-gown and elegant flat shoes, looks like a celebrity in their dressing-room, accepting of portrayal, one hand placed patiently atop the other. The face, however, has an enthusiasm which betrays the body. The thick black shadows which the body’s torso throws onto the wall behind suggest the effect of a photographic flash. Photography’s emphasis on the bodily features of the subject and disinterest in the rest of the world are, however, absent here; the brushwork used to represent this body do not offer the narcissistic attentions that photography promises. The indeterminacy of these paintings offers a satiric mirror to the racism of cameras.

The interplay of light and darkness in this painting induces in the viewer an uncertainty which is central to the power of these paintings. Where the viewer of an equally large oil painting in a national art gallery would expect to recognise the signifiers which guide looking – the sociological facts of gender, sexuality, class, name, affect – Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits offer only uncertainty. Who – or what – is ‘Oyster’? A parochial viewer might think of the Oyster cards of the smooth and expensive London Transport System; we might hear Zora Neale Hurston sharpening her ‘oyster knife’; I remain uncertain whose world this oyster is. If it is a name, ‘Oyster’ doesn’t confirm the subject’s gender, but its aphrodisiac connotations, the sympathetic magic of its shape’s correspondent, signal the erotics of uncertainty. It is unclear whether this body is male or female. This indeterminacy is central to art’s radical calling-into-question of identity politics..."

 Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Man Science, 2012, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London. 

Photo: Marcus Leith.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Milk for the Maestro, 2012, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London. 

Photo: Marcus Leith

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, born in 1977, is an artist based in London. She attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, Falmouth College of Arts and the Royal Academy Schools. Yiadom-Boakye has shown work internationally in exhibitions. She received the main prize of the Future Generation Art Prize in 2012

Reblogged from:  http://www.contemporaryand.com/blog/person/lynetteyiadom-boakye/