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拍品專文
“Over time I realised I needed to think less about the subject and more about the painting. So I began to think very seriously about colour, light and composition. The more I worked, the more I came to realise that the power was in the painting itself. My ‘colour politics’ took on a whole new meaning.” Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye," New Yorker, June 19, 2017, pg. 52
A graceful young woman commands the composition of this large-scale canvas. Poised like a ballet dancer, she stands confidently, her hands clasped to the front, and her left leg poised forward at a right angle like a ballerina. Turning her face slightly, her chin is lifted towards her left shoulder to look up and away as if giving one last contemplative glance toward the crowd before commencing her performance. The sense of drama in Painkiller ensures that it emerges as an exemplar from the acclaimed British-Ghanian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly practice. The artist eloquently articulates the full complexity of human subjectivity via her confident brushstrokes. Her subjects, while inhabiting the genre’s conventional framework, are not portraits; Yiadom-Boakye constructs her figures not from life but from a potent mélange of found images, memory, and vivid imagination intermingled with a certain spontaneity expressed through painterly improvisation. While ostensibly a successor to a great lineage of Western portraitists, from Goya and Hals to Whistler and Sargent, Yiadom-Boakye composes her subjects like a novelist, her figures reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy or Gabriel Garcia-Marquez in their fictive ability to appear more realistic than reality—unencumbered from representational modes, the audience intimately comprehends and inhabits these figures, ascribing their own stories onto the image.
Yiadom-Boakye delights the eye in her subtle manipulation of paint across canvas. Working with the time-honored materials of an old master—a rabbit-skin glue gesso binding oil paint to canvas—the artist expeditiously paints her work wet-on-wet to fully exploit the medium’s physicality. Sophisticated underpainting allows this warm backdrop of subtle hues to develop into areas of vivid abstraction, demonstrative of the sheer exuberance achievable through the medium. The artist employs a kaleidoscope of atmospheric and organic hues against the tableau, reveling in the bottomless depth which her palette achieves across the economically-applied paint surface. The dense layers of pigment on the woman’s left leg establish the work’s focal point, the profound contrast vis-à-vis the shadowed right leg providing a charged element of potential movement amid an otherwise tranquil image.
Painkiller achieves an evocative sense of timelessness, creating a space of stillness and repose inviting contemplative solitude and silence. Yiadom-Boakye strives to exhume notions of contemporaneity or temporality from her work, depicting her Black figures in ambiguous vistas devoid of context. The darkened swirled form of the floor on which our figure stands slowly fades into the cream background, a bare spatial suggestion in an otherwise ethereal composition. Such an atmospheric environment allows for a full enjoyment of character, unleashing the emotional charge held within Yiadom-Boakye’s figure. The deep psychological power of the artist’s characters coupled with her technical masterly evoke the spirit of Diego Velázquez, particularly in his portrait of the Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. Yiadom-Boakye is a careful student of art history, her citations of posture and pose evidencing the multitudes of monographs of Degas, Manet, and others filling her studio. Rare among her portraits, Painkiller features meticulously-rendered ruby-red shoes, an item typically omitted from Yiadom-Boakye’s work to further her timeless effect. Here the shot of red pigment perfectly complements the soft teal of the figure’s loosely-draped blouse, providing compositional unity bridging the dark foreground with the light background.
Yiadom-Boakye is a writer and poet as well as a painter, and within her canvas she writes a poem in paint, drawing out such strong and universally human emotions that her figure compiles a lifetime of stories within a singular picture frame. Yiadom-Boakye’s titles are as allusive as her characters, which the artist considers simply as “an extra mark in the paintings… I don’t paint about writing or write about paintings. It’s just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about” (Y. Boakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, New Yorker June 19, 2017 p. 52).
A graceful young woman commands the composition of this large-scale canvas. Poised like a ballet dancer, she stands confidently, her hands clasped to the front, and her left leg poised forward at a right angle like a ballerina. Turning her face slightly, her chin is lifted towards her left shoulder to look up and away as if giving one last contemplative glance toward the crowd before commencing her performance. The sense of drama in Painkiller ensures that it emerges as an exemplar from the acclaimed British-Ghanian artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly practice. The artist eloquently articulates the full complexity of human subjectivity via her confident brushstrokes. Her subjects, while inhabiting the genre’s conventional framework, are not portraits; Yiadom-Boakye constructs her figures not from life but from a potent mélange of found images, memory, and vivid imagination intermingled with a certain spontaneity expressed through painterly improvisation. While ostensibly a successor to a great lineage of Western portraitists, from Goya and Hals to Whistler and Sargent, Yiadom-Boakye composes her subjects like a novelist, her figures reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy or Gabriel Garcia-Marquez in their fictive ability to appear more realistic than reality—unencumbered from representational modes, the audience intimately comprehends and inhabits these figures, ascribing their own stories onto the image.
Yiadom-Boakye delights the eye in her subtle manipulation of paint across canvas. Working with the time-honored materials of an old master—a rabbit-skin glue gesso binding oil paint to canvas—the artist expeditiously paints her work wet-on-wet to fully exploit the medium’s physicality. Sophisticated underpainting allows this warm backdrop of subtle hues to develop into areas of vivid abstraction, demonstrative of the sheer exuberance achievable through the medium. The artist employs a kaleidoscope of atmospheric and organic hues against the tableau, reveling in the bottomless depth which her palette achieves across the economically-applied paint surface. The dense layers of pigment on the woman’s left leg establish the work’s focal point, the profound contrast vis-à-vis the shadowed right leg providing a charged element of potential movement amid an otherwise tranquil image.
Painkiller achieves an evocative sense of timelessness, creating a space of stillness and repose inviting contemplative solitude and silence. Yiadom-Boakye strives to exhume notions of contemporaneity or temporality from her work, depicting her Black figures in ambiguous vistas devoid of context. The darkened swirled form of the floor on which our figure stands slowly fades into the cream background, a bare spatial suggestion in an otherwise ethereal composition. Such an atmospheric environment allows for a full enjoyment of character, unleashing the emotional charge held within Yiadom-Boakye’s figure. The deep psychological power of the artist’s characters coupled with her technical masterly evoke the spirit of Diego Velázquez, particularly in his portrait of the Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. Yiadom-Boakye is a careful student of art history, her citations of posture and pose evidencing the multitudes of monographs of Degas, Manet, and others filling her studio. Rare among her portraits, Painkiller features meticulously-rendered ruby-red shoes, an item typically omitted from Yiadom-Boakye’s work to further her timeless effect. Here the shot of red pigment perfectly complements the soft teal of the figure’s loosely-draped blouse, providing compositional unity bridging the dark foreground with the light background.
Yiadom-Boakye is a writer and poet as well as a painter, and within her canvas she writes a poem in paint, drawing out such strong and universally human emotions that her figure compiles a lifetime of stories within a singular picture frame. Yiadom-Boakye’s titles are as allusive as her characters, which the artist considers simply as “an extra mark in the paintings… I don’t paint about writing or write about paintings. It’s just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about” (Y. Boakye, quoted in Zadie Smith, “A Bird of Few Words: Narrative mysteries in the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, New Yorker June 19, 2017 p. 52).