“I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.”
A n intimate and lyrically expressive portrait, Rose Neither Poetry is a paradigmatic piece in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s body of work. Critically acclaimed and broadly recognized for her portraits of ethereal composite subjects and invented characters, Yiadom-Boakye’s signature dusky, nocturnal palette and iconic figurative grammar come together powerfully in Rose Neither Poetry. Executed in 2012, the present work is a beguiling portrait that wields a magnetic auratic power. The sitter's gaze arrests the viewer, transmitting with them a profound depth of emotion that is exceptional even within the artist’s larger body of work, which has been largely celebrated for their expressive capacity and emotive layers. Rose Neither Poetry is a particularly stunning example of Yiadom-Boakye’s facility for constructing an atmospheric viewing experience. Moreover, this supernal quality is further heightened by the artist's signature form of portraiture—the act of painting each figure is also a conjuring, the retrieval and expression of an imagined being—but this iteration is distinguished by a particularly captivating mood and aura by way of a playful charm and utter elegance that stands out within the impressive oeuvre of the artist.
Enhancing the effect of the sitter's piercing eyes, Yiadom-Boakye crafts a fully vivacious persona by imbuing a coy tilt to the figure, a flirtatiousness to her posture. Constituted through fast-paced, expressive painting, the artist’s brushwork in Rose Neither Poerty is full of motion; the fluidity and feathery lightness of the paint builds a narrative around her figure that is fully articulated, yet resplendent with light and space, despite the work's dark color palette. Paradoxically, this visual treatment of darkness in Rose Neither Poetry expands the space and airy quality of the work, setting Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly vernacular aside from the art historical canon, where blackness has been often associated with a feeling of gravity and weight. Referencing a legacy of European academic painting, particularly in her use of chiaroscuro, Yiadom-Boakye inserts imagined Black figures into the lineage of Rembrandt’s oeuvre and Govaert Flinck’s The Young Archer.
A master of light and shadow, Yiadom-Boakye has pushed the technical lexicon of art history forward. Working within the tradition of 20th and 21st century figurative painters who are expanding the idiom, Yiadom-Boakye fashions an insistent poetic presence from a field of dusky and nocturnal umbers, browns and blacks. As the acclaimed scholar, critic, and novelist Zadie Smith has written of Yiadom-Boakye’s works: “Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative.” (Zadie Smith, “Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits,” The New Yorker, 12 June 2017)
“Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes. But the deeper beguilement is how she manages to create the effect of wholly realized figures while simultaneously confounding so many of our assumptions about the figurative.”
There is no doubt as to why Yiadom-Boakye has often been hailed, alongside artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Henry Taylor, and Noah Davis, as a painter that has revolutionized the practice of portraiture.
© Kerry James Marshall; © 2015 Museum Associates / LACMA, and Art Resource, New York
The artist has reclaimed the centuries old tradition of depicting imagined subjects not only by centering a Black subjectivity but also by building on canonical techniques and painterly language to create an image familiar, yet estranged—traditional, yet insurgent. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2013 and the recipient of much critical fanfare for the major survey of her work at the Tate Britain from 2020-2021, Yiadom-Boakye has been widely lauded both critically and academically for her substantive and successful movements to restructure the institutional lexicon of Replica Handbags .
Despite the otherworldly elegance and poise of its imaginary subject, who has no real living correlate, Rose Neither Poetry effects a deep sense of intimacy. Critics have drawn parallels between Boakye and René Magritte’s work—both possess the uncanny facility to produce images that are more than records and to induce viewers into identifying with someone who does not exist. Rose Neither Poetry is a painting that gazes back—an exceptionally mood-inflected work of Yiadom-Boakye’s, the present work is an exemplar of atmospheric impact and emotional depth.
