Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is a big deal in art. She has had shows at Tate Britain in London and the Guggenheim in Bilbao. She’s in all the biennales. Her pictures sell for millions and she was recently voted “the number one most bankable contemporary artist”. So it’s heartening to see her display her latest wares not in one of the showy art lofts in Mayfair but in the hardworking and earthy Corvi-Mora gallery in south London. Good on her.
The show is called Keep the Moon Amongst Ourselves, a lyrical title taken from one of her poems. She fancies herself as a writer as well as a painter. And although her written work tends to overdo the dreaminess, it signals, I think, a direction in which we need to follow her in her art.
Most of the black poetry that reaches our ears is harsh and urban, packed with hissy consonants. “Crack mothers, crack babies and Aids patients/ Youngbloods can’t spell, but they could rock you in PlayStation,” as the rapper Mos Def once put it. But Yiadom-Boakye’s words, like her pictures, point to more thoughtful, less fractured inner worlds. In her output, black art is taken off the streets and repositioned in the library, or in front of a fire with a good book, or next to a loved one with a glass of decent claret. It’s not the black experience we are used to. As I said … good on her.
At the Corvi-Mora gallery she is showing 16 new works, mostly paintings, but with something different added to her mix: a set of shadowy charcoal drawings in which the details are reduced and the mystery enlarged. The images are portraits of sorts, mostly of black men, but with a few thoughtful women thrown in, some of whom I suspect of being hideaway Yiadom-Boakyes.
‘It’s a post-teenage cast: working adults, not rich, not poor, the kind of everyday city dweller who is never usually heroised in art. We join them not in their office hours, but afterwards when they are taking evening classes in dance, or back from the office listening to jazz, or home alone with their hopes and sadnesses. There’s a powerful sense of yearning in all the work, as if everyone here is trying to touch something deeper, better or more meaningful than the working day usually supplies.
The first painting we see, called Vernacular Warnings (whatever that means), is one of the few with a feminine presence. Four women are sitting on a sofa, dressed, I would guess, for a dance class. Three are in white leggings and tight, white tops. The fourth is in casual green and black as if she’s forgotten her dance gear and has to work in whatever she’s got.
Their faces, too, present an interesting range of expressions. Three of the women look glum, a typical Yiadom-Boakye mood, but the fourth has burst into a toothy laugh and her brightness seems to find an echo in the zippy coloured rug at their feet. The gloom of the others finds its echo in the brown emptiness in which they sit. You’re encouraged to find a storyline to follow, but there isn’t one, nothing concrete at least. All we’ve got is the interplay of atmospheres.
Although they look like portraits of specific people, Yiadom-Boakye insists we need to see her cast as amalgamations, creations, symbolic types. A battle is being waged here, you sense, to lift black portraiture to heights that are poetic and intense, lyrical and emotional, warm and touching. The privileged territory of the vulnerable inner life, which has given white portraiture some of its most memorable moments, is being claimed for the black face.
Something else that’s going on is the de-exoticising of the black presence in art: the other is being tugged from over there to over here. In The Spine, the Spleen, and the Reason, two black men are lounging in a library. Their submergence in literature is all the subject the picture needs. In The Never Ever, a man in glasses plays cards with himself and has managed to pick two symbolic-feeling aces — the ace of spades and the ace of hearts. In Careworn in the Eaves, a black man holds a black cat. And that’s it.
Also intriguing is how directly Yiadom-Boakye confronts the issue of artistic colour. Painting black faces demands a different palette from painting white ones. Or rather, it places different demands on the artist’s palette. Some excellent black artists are producing portraits that require impressive skill – Claudette Johnson, Barbara Walker. But none of them seems to be dealing with the pictorial complexity of the territory with such old masterish focus.
In Sing to the Quick, Speak to the Dead, a black man in a white T-shirt, hunched over an empty white plate set on a white table cloth, stares out at us with a sense of confrontation. Is he waiting for his dinner? Are we supposed to serve him? The title, like most of the titles, is no help whatsoever. All it does is signal poetic intentions in the mood.
Elsewhere, the telling black and whiteness of the man with a plate — and of all the charcoal drawings — is replaced by something that feels like a guilty pleasure: a desire to unleash some zingy colours. The jazzy rug of the dance ensemble, or the canary yellow and electric blue of the two guys eating pears in More Gifts Than I Can Mention are exciting moments of tonal adventure. Even on a journey of de-exoticisation as determined as Yiadom-Boakye’s, there’s room, it appears, for an occasional bouquet of Gauguin colours.
Keep the Moon Amongst Ourselves, Corvi-Mora, London SE11, to Mar 1, corvi-mora.com