lynette yiadom-boakye: essays and letters
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Essays and LettersLynette Yiadom-Boakye
MICHAEL STEVENSON
Essays and LettersLynette Yiadom-Boakye
21 January – 6 March 2010
The imaginary portrait is a peculiar genre that has only
intermittently cropped up in the history of Western painting –
one thinks above all of Fragonard’s ‘figures de fantaisie’ – but has
become increasingly significant in the last couple of decades. I
first began noticing imaginary portraits as a trend in New York
around 1990, when painters like John Currin, Catherine Howe
and Lisa Yuskavage caught my eye. Now, a generation younger
than those artists, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye gives a very different
spin to the genre. For her older contemporaries, the imaginary
portrait was essentially a device motivated by a perverse sort of
formalism, a way for painting to talk about painting – its history,
its conventions, its practice. I see Yiadom-Boakye’s concerns
as being rather different. Not that she is uninterested in her
medium’s capacity for reflexive self-interrogation. But I don’t
think that is her fundamental concern. More important is what
seems to be an almost novelistic impulse in Yiadom-Boakye’s
work. She seems to want to conjure a character, 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.
What makes this novelistic impulse all the more surprising – and
more powerful for that – is that, while there are exceptions, most
of Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are of single figures, not of groups.
Because people are not shown interacting with each other, there
is no implication of narrative. The novelistic impulse at work in
these paintings is not a narrative impulse. Nor does she want to
picture the individual as a product of his or her time and place.
Their nebulous settings – one might say, as one often can of the
portraits of Velázquez, that their environment is simply that of
painting itself – isolate the figures from all distracting externalities.
It’s hard even to guess when these people are supposed to have
lived: their generally nondescript clothing tells us they are not
from far in the past, but they may not be entirely contemporary
either; they could as easily have looked this way forty years ago
as today. Rather, Yiadom-Boakye seems to want to avail herself
of the novelist’s privilege of conjuring the complex inner life of
an imaginary person. Always, her characters are posing. They
are trying to present themselves as they would like to be seen.
And yet they show something more or, perhaps it’s better to say,
something other than an easy public face. Perhaps the artist
herself could not say what that something else is – but she saw it,
she knew that it was the thing she meant, and she gave it to the
rest of us to see. I or any other viewer can try to say what that
something is, but only in the realisation that there is no way to
confirm one’s conjecture. That accounts for a fascinating tension
in these paintings: they show us people who are more complex
than we can ever know.
While the painter can communicate the sense that there is
an inner life at work in each of her characters, she cannot – in
contrast to the novelist – pretend to make that life present to us.
Paintings show us the surface of the visible world, not the workings
of the mind. Yet the intense painterliness deployed by Yiadom-
Boakye complicates the viewer’s ability to grasp these surfaces,
for it constantly reminds us that what we are given to see in the
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits
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painting is not after all the flesh of a person’s face, the texture of
their hair or of the fabric of their clothing, but that of paint, of
a once-fluid substance with which the artist has exerted herself
in order to evoke an image. In doing so, it also reminds us that
the image is not inert, but has been charged with intentionality,
with thought, with inwardness. Not the inwardness of the fictional
subject, of course, but of the artist herself. And yet because her
thought was so intently of this imaginary person, that distinction
becomes tenuous: an imaginary man or woman is a vessel for
the artist’s feeling, but in taking shape through this process of
imagining, the feeling has been transformed, has become the
feeling of another.
Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international
reviews for Artforum. His books include The Widening Circle: Consequences
of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), Vitamin P:
New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press), and Opera: Poems 1981-2002
(Meritage Press).
Barry Schwabsky
5
Piano
2009
Oil on canvas
180 x 160cm
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7
11pm, Thursday
2009
Oil on canvas
200 x 130cm
8
Doves
2009
Oil on canvas
200 x 120cm
9
5am, Cadiz
2009
Oil on canvas
160 x 200cm
10
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Opening scene: (The smallest of three pigeons leans against a
lamp-post on the corner and watches.)
A couple emerges from the mainline railway station. They are in
very high spirits.
They carry little: she a tan leather handbag (Note to Wardrobe
dept: oversized with a gold clasp, expensive), and he a camera
(Note to Prop dept: enormous lens, analogue, old).
They cross to the bus depot where several people await different
buses in long queues under the bus shelter.
Initially they stand apart from the queues, in the sunshine.
They canoodle, he fusses over her hair, she over his lapels, like
couples do.
(Curious, the smallest of the three pigeons flies up to the top of
the lamp-post for a better view from above.)
She, the female half of the couple (we’ll call her Mary for now),
laughs loudly, intrusively, as if wanting to be noticed. Thus many
of those standing around look over at them, irritated by the
disturbance, as Londoners are irritated by any disturbance.
Mary wears little (Note to Wardrobe: tiny khaki shorts, bare
legs, wooden heels, white vest, brown leather jacket), her hair is
tousled, brown and blonde, and her skin is golden.
Mary clearly eats very little. She is tall and lean with slightly
protruding teeth that seem to have beaten all attempts
at correction. This would not be so noticeable were her
cheekbones less sharp and cheeks less sunken through lack
of food (Note to Casting: find model cum actress cum dancer
cum singer).
(The smallest of the three pigeons leans in a little closer to get a
better look at them. He stifles a chuckle and is not heard.)
Her companion (we’ll call him Joe, no, Geoffroy. He is English,
though of mainland European extraction perhaps) is at least half
a foot shorter than her. He dresses as the idle and inexplicably rich
of London invariably do (Note to Wardrobe: white shirt not tucked
in, dark jeans neither skinny nor slack, jumper tied loosely about
his shoulders, brogues, ironic cufflinks etc).
Geoffroy has two glossy brown curtains of hair, which only partially
obscure a small, pointed and rodent-like face, a handsome and
not particularly likeable face.
Geoffroy has now taken his camera out of its case (Note to Prop
dept: it should be in an old case, brown, battered, worn).
Mary is striking playful poses with Geoffroy’s encouragement.
Geoffroy is taking many photos of her. Mary is confident in front
of the camera. Geoffroy is an animated, if somewhat affected
photographer.
Stage Directions for a Short Tragedy
14
(The smallest of the three pigeons is quite beside himself with
laughter by this point, and very nearly loses his balance. He
manages to regain some of his composure, but not all of it.)
Geoffroy and Mary are now very involved with the photo session
and grow increasingly daring with composition, oblivious to the
disdain of the people.
Mary removes her jacket and tosses it onto the bonnet of a nearby
cab, much to the distaste of the cab driver (Note to Casting: a
rotund and ruddy-faced cab driver).
Geoffroy continues snapping.
Mary removes her shoes and shins up the lamp-post, just a little
way up.
Geoffroy takes position beneath her, lying flat on the ground with
his lower body in the road and still snapping, shouting “Bravo,
bravo! Higher!”
(The smallest of the three pigeons can see Mary edging her way
towards him and is not happy about it.)
Mary shimmies higher up the cold metal pole, sinewy coltish
thighs straining to hold on, smiling and waving down.
Geoffroy wants more. “Beautiful! Higher, baby, higher!” His bony
body is writhing about in the gutter, bony little legs akimbo in the
road, shooting Mary from every possible angle.
So the higher Mary goes, the more photos Geoffroy takes. And
the more photos Geoffroy takes the higher Mary feels inspired
to go. They are both very excited. And they are distracted, very
much in their own world.
Hence, Mary has a terrible shock when the pigeon droppings hit
her square in the right eye. So terrible a shock that she falls from
the top of the lamp-post and onto Geoffroy who is still laid out flat
on his back below. And this is just as well as it means they are both
unconscious (or dead) before the double-decker bus rolls around
the corner and over his two little legs, which are still poking out
into the road.
(The smallest of the three pigeons flies off, a little remorseful but
extremely hungry.)
It is a dreadful scene. But the bodies are taken away and everything
is cleaned up nicely.
And when the camera film is developed, all agree that the
photographs are very beautiful.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
15
16
Wingbeater
2009
Oil on canvas
200 x 120cm
17
La Cloche
2009
Oil on canvas
200 x 160cm
18
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20
The World In Accordance With
2009
Oil on canvas
180 x 200cm
21
Pleased to Meet You
2009
Installation of 20 paintings
Oil on canvas
42 x 37cm each (framed)
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25
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Catalogue no 48 January 2010
Cover image The World In Accordance With, 2009, detail
Michael Stevenson
Buchanan Building
160 Sir Lowry Road
Woodstock 7925
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500
info@michaelstevenson.com
www.michaelstevenson.com
Editor Sophie Perryer
Design Gabrielle Guy
Photography and image repro Mario Todeschini
Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town
BiographyLynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977 in London to Ghanaian
parents; she completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal
Academy Schools, London, in 2003. Recent solo shows have
taken place at Faye Fleming & Partner in Geneva (2007 and
2009). Group shows include Living Together: Strategies for Co-
habitation at the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea,
Vitoria-Gasteiz, and the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo
in Spain (2009); the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2008); Flow at
the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008); The Unhomely:
Phantom Scenes in Global Society, the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006-
2007), and Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the Barbican,
London (2004-2005).
Works courtesy of Faye Fleming & Partner, Geneva
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MICHAEL STEVENSON
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