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拍品專文
Spanning an impressive width of two metres, 5am, Cádiz (2009) is a characteristically enigmatic painting by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Propped on one arm, a male figure reclines languidly against a shimmering seascape, and stares ahead at the viewer with striking directness. Interested more in mood than fixing her figures within a specific place or time, Yiadom-Boakye reminds us that—as is the case with all her paintings—this is a scene of fiction. Her figures are conjured from an alchemy of imagination, memory, improvisation, and found visual material. In the cool, half-light of early morning, the subject of 5am, Cádiz feels uncannily displaced, suspended in the liminal no man’s land between night and day. The work is one of a sequence of paintings made by the artist over the course of almost a decade that feature this same character, depicted at different hours of the day in the Cádiz landscape. 8am Cádiz (2017) is held in the collection of The Baltimore Museum of Art. Conjuring Spain’s histories of transatlantic slave-trading, the present work is a powerful example of the artist’s ongoing investigation of black identity, and the interpretive freedom inherent in her storytelling.
Employing a muted, earthy palette of brown, ochre, and burnt umber pigments, Yiadom-Boakye’s practice takes inspiration from a strong pedigree of artists, from Old Masters such as Goya, Velázquez, Hals and Sargent to Modernists including Manet, Degas and Sickert. These painters share an interest in the physicality of paint, and sought to render space—its airiness and shadows—as well as form. Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects often inhabit vacant rooms stripped of objects and vast open landscapes, and here, Cádiz’s sand dunes offer a typically dreamlike backdrop. Glimpses of buildings and settlements on the horizon line are obfuscated by loose and hypnotic brushstrokes; the artist warns us that this distant civilisation may well be a mirage. Yiadom-Boakye applies paint with deft and improvised fluency that is, as described by novelist Zadie Smith, evocative of writing. She paints swiftly, often completing canvases in one sitting. Brushstrokes are the artist’s articulation, writes Smith, and ‘The canvas is the text’ (Z. Smith, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits’, The New Yorker, 12 June 2017).
Indeed, Yiadom-Boakye has famously stated that her titles constitute ‘an extra mark in the paintings’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ibid). A writer as well as a painter, she is a master of capturing the complex inner lives of her subjects whilst eluding explanation or explicit narrative. Stories reverberate implicitly through her canvases with a deep, psychological hum. By the end of the seventeenth century Cádiz—situated between North Africa and the Atlantic sea—was the epicentre of Spain’s transatlantic slave trade, responsible for transporting several hundreds of thousands of African captives to South and Central America and colonies in the Caribbean. The hazy mystery of Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas is sharply inflected by her title, as the viewer comes to consider the threatening proximity of the sea, the subject’s origins, and perhaps his fate. Reading very little in his expression, we might question whether 5am, Cádiz marks the opening or final scene in the story. Art historian Barry Schwabsky identifies a ‘novelistic impulse’ in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings. ‘She seems to want to conjure a character,’ he writes, ‘much as a writer of fiction might, synthesising him or her out of some imponderable amalgamation of diverse observations from both life itself and the art of her precursors’ (B. Schwabsky, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Essays and Letters, exh. cat. Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town 2010, p. 4). Enchanting and steeped in significance, the present work is a captivating triumph of Yiadom-Boakye’s creative power.
Employing a muted, earthy palette of brown, ochre, and burnt umber pigments, Yiadom-Boakye’s practice takes inspiration from a strong pedigree of artists, from Old Masters such as Goya, Velázquez, Hals and Sargent to Modernists including Manet, Degas and Sickert. These painters share an interest in the physicality of paint, and sought to render space—its airiness and shadows—as well as form. Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects often inhabit vacant rooms stripped of objects and vast open landscapes, and here, Cádiz’s sand dunes offer a typically dreamlike backdrop. Glimpses of buildings and settlements on the horizon line are obfuscated by loose and hypnotic brushstrokes; the artist warns us that this distant civilisation may well be a mirage. Yiadom-Boakye applies paint with deft and improvised fluency that is, as described by novelist Zadie Smith, evocative of writing. She paints swiftly, often completing canvases in one sitting. Brushstrokes are the artist’s articulation, writes Smith, and ‘The canvas is the text’ (Z. Smith, ‘Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits’, The New Yorker, 12 June 2017).
Indeed, Yiadom-Boakye has famously stated that her titles constitute ‘an extra mark in the paintings’ (L. Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in ibid). A writer as well as a painter, she is a master of capturing the complex inner lives of her subjects whilst eluding explanation or explicit narrative. Stories reverberate implicitly through her canvases with a deep, psychological hum. By the end of the seventeenth century Cádiz—situated between North Africa and the Atlantic sea—was the epicentre of Spain’s transatlantic slave trade, responsible for transporting several hundreds of thousands of African captives to South and Central America and colonies in the Caribbean. The hazy mystery of Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas is sharply inflected by her title, as the viewer comes to consider the threatening proximity of the sea, the subject’s origins, and perhaps his fate. Reading very little in his expression, we might question whether 5am, Cádiz marks the opening or final scene in the story. Art historian Barry Schwabsky identifies a ‘novelistic impulse’ in Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings. ‘She seems to want to conjure a character,’ he writes, ‘much as a writer of fiction might, synthesising him or her out of some imponderable amalgamation of diverse observations from both life itself and the art of her precursors’ (B. Schwabsky, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Essays and Letters, exh. cat. Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town 2010, p. 4). Enchanting and steeped in significance, the present work is a captivating triumph of Yiadom-Boakye’s creative power.