Book in hand and feet bare, a lone figure traipses across a tranquil landscape with meditative grace in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Secular Readings. Executed in 2010, the present work invites the viewer into an imagined world, a state that seamlessly alternates between dream, imagination, and reality. Dignified and solemn, the protagonist in Secular Readings emanates an arresting sense of self with enviable ease – this psychological complexity is foundational to Yiadom-Boakye’s figurative vision. In a subtle subversion of portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye’s stripped-back paintings eschew grandeur in favor of bringing an unfettered sense of humanity to the fore. The narrative intrigue of Secular Readings is heightened by Yiadom-Boakye’s dramatic use of chiaroscuro, which casts her figure in sharp relief and pitches his shadow across the expanse of the canvas. Borrowed from predecessors such as Edward Hopper, Edgar Degas, and Caspar David Friedrich, these compositional cues are transposed with Yiadom-Boakye’s unique artistic voice to fabricate filmic universes imbued with modernistic historical impermanence. Laconic and beautiful, the subject’s contemplative posture brings into focus the ethos of Yiadom-Boakye’s rightfully celebrated artistry, which evokes the language of poetry – a fiction imbued with reality and truth.

Secular Readings is exemplary of the artist’s ability to summon emotional veracity through painting. Rendered in muted and earthy tones, Yiadom-Boakye’s solitary figure seems to emerge from the landscape that engulfs him, both his origin and his destination unknown. Every modulation in light and form seeps through the canvas as carefully modulated hues and shades, an exercise in the monochrome. Dramatic lighting cuts through Yiadom-Boakye’s otherwise flat composition, fixing her subject in space, however gesturally evoked. Yiadom-Boakye does not veil the artistic difficulties inherent to her particular brand of quiet, sensual realism, but rather demands an intense kind of slow looking from every viewer in the tradition of artists such as Manet and Degas.

In a deviation from traditional portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are not grounded in reality; rather, they are imagined, sprung from family snapshots, collects ed scrapbook materials, even a simple mood or glance. Indeed, the present landscape feels as if conjured from a memory, with no defining and definitive clues of context or location. Yiadom-Boakye’s portraiture relies completely on sent.mes nt as a means of defining personhood. As Andrea Schlieker writes, “It is left to us to ascribe to the characters their story, to delve further into the serenity of her intimate fictions. They have the quality of characters from a novel or phantoms from a dream, yet they are so vividly portrayed, so full of personality, their gaze so compellingly alive, that the viewer experiences an instant sense of recognition.” (Andrea Schlieker, “Quiet Fires: The Paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye” in: Exh. Cat., Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With the Night, London 2020, p. 13)

This allure of fiction and implied narrative is intrinsic to Yiadom-Boakye’s body of work – Secular Readings extends this conceptual project through its protagonist’s metacognition. The artist herself has commented how each of her characters take on imagined lives of their own: “Although they are not real I think of them as people known to me. They are imbued with a power of their own… I admire them for their strength, their moral fibre." (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat. The Studio Museum in Harlem, Flow, 2008, p. 103) Just as we, as viewers, are invited into Yiadom-Boakye’s conjured narratives, the figure in Secular Readings engages himself in a separate world of fact or fiction through his reading, taking on the role of critic, scholar, and consumer in a parallel to his observers.

Secular Readings evinces Yiadom-Boakye’s ability to distill profound emotions into a simple composition, brimming with eloquence. With languid elegance and sophisticated intelligence, the present work integrates many key aspects of her oeuvre: tremoring between contemporary and classical, it holds up a mirror to society and forms a breathtakingly beautiful ode to painting.

Artist

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye