Eye to eye and face to face, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s A Focus For The Cavalry entrances the viewer. Executed in 2016, the present work invites the viewer into an imagined world, a limbo state that seamlessly alternates between dream, imagination, and reality. As the gaze softens and the viewer escapes the mesmerizing trance produced by the dramatic brushwork of the face, we are forced to consider the pose. Yiadom-Boakye routinely makes use of the reclining figure, subverting the expectation of a female subject and placing herself in an art historical lineage to which she is extremely attuned. Color, composition, glance, or pose borrowed from predecessors such as Walter Sickert, Édouard Manet, John Singer Sargent and Paul Cezanne are transposed with Yiadom-Boakye’s unique artistic voice to fabricate imagined universes, creating a body of work imbued with modernistic historical impermanence. Laconic, beautiful, the subject’s contemplative yet confident glare brings into focus the ethos of Yiadom-Boakye’s rightfully celebrated artistry, as we are treated to her deliberately frenetic brushstrokes, blissfully engulfing spectators in a sea of mahogany in motion.

Included in the A Passion To A Principle exhibition held at Kunsthalle Basel in 2016, A Focus For The Cavalry continues Yiadom-Boakye’s practice of creating introspective viewing experiences that encourage intimacy with her paintings despite their impressive scale. The subject finds himself consumed by a cloud of dark copper hues meticulously layered to mimic deep onyx and birch. Tethered by a foot grounded in shades of earthly beige, the subject’s body interacts with the canvas as his knee bends into grazing a sky of soft ethereal pink. Uninhibited by periodization, his clothes are unattributable to any specific t.mes or place endowing the imagined sitter with an aura of autonomy in juxtaposition to his illusory conception.

When describings her subjects, Yiadom-Boakye states that “If they are pathetic, they don’t survive – if I feel sorry for someone, I get rid of them. I don’t like to paint victims.” (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate (and traveling), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night, 2020-2023, p. 14) Emblematic of these words and exemplified within her private pantheon of mostly male recumbent figures we find paintings bestowed with a strong sense of unwavering confidence and defiant individuality. Works such as Closer to a Comfort from 2018, whose subject’s intense gaze matches that of the present lot, find their counterpart in others such as Coagulant Dangers from 2018 whose subjects appear inaccessible and apathetic to worlds outside of their own. Irrespective of their attitude, each of the figures in these works emits a self-reliant presence that can be felt far beyond the canvas.

Resonating with the vivacious spontaneity of Franz Hals' unrestrained brushwork and the profound insight into the human spirit that Anthony van Dyck 's portraits exude, each intimate moment brought to life by Yiadom-Boakye engages in a profound dialogue between the underpinnings of European portraiture and her virtuosic propensity for infusing art history's most enduring themes into her expansive visual repertoire. Created over a century and a half after Édouard Manet's seminal Olympia, A Focus For The Cavalry adeptly reimagines and reenergizes a genre that was originally intended for memorializing social class, and instead offers a contemporary reassessment of the reclining figure. Central to the composition of Manet's magnum opus, Olympia confidently assumes a nude pose with an unabashed gaze that defied traditional portrayals of women, and offers a self-aware subject, embodying notions of female autonomy and empowerment, and challenging the 19th-century French bourgeoisie's hypocritical views on sexual taboos. In striking opposition, Laure, the obscured figure occupying the background, assumes a dual role, representing both the explicit and metaphorical embodiment of the prevailing racial hierarchy and colonial past of that era. Laure's placement at the foot of the composition emphasizes the racial dynamics and how they affected portraiture, including color palette, hierarchical arrangement, and posture.

Balancing the realms of both universes, the central figure in A Focus For The Cavalry assumes the allure and palpable individuality of Olympia, all the while affectionately embracing a comparable brown color scheme of Laure. Deconstructing the airs of nobility once assumed by the individuals who traditionally served as the sitters, the subject of the current lot asserts his position within the heritage of European portraiture. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's exploration within the realm of art history have become a permanent fixture, as her works share the walls with luminaries such as Peter Paul Rubens and Caravaggio, as her paintings have been enshrined in the esteemed collects ions of The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate (London), Dallas Museum of Art, and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others.

Deceptively nuanced in nature, the act of almost exclusively painting Black subjects forges questions about how one interprets representation. When fellow artist and friend Glenn Ligon describes her works he states “to invent a figure you have to start somewhere, so she must have started with herself, from there building a scaffold on which to hang things like blackness or masculinity, things that are fugitive and subject to revision.“ (Glenn Ligon quoted in: “On the Hour, On the t.mes s,” in: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dark, London, 2015, p.107) For Yiadom-Boakye this choice isn't politicized, or revolutionary. She sees her practice as an exultance of normalcy through contemporary portrayals of figures emanating dreamlike realism, both clear and oblique, as if seen through the haze of fading memories.

Artist

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye