Afromantics from 2002 is an exquisite example of Chris Ofili’s seminal Within Reach series. Presented as part of his highly acclaimed British Pavilion exhibition at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the present work is a critically important work which marks a defining moment within Ofili’s oeuvre. The series began with a postcard that Ofili took home from his first trip to Trinidad in 2000. Depicting lovers embracing under a palm tree, this clichéd trope of a tropical holiday romance became the springboard for the series’ utopian love story. In Afromantics, Ofili layers the canvas with paint, map pins, glitter and resin to create a mesmerizing image of two lovers staring romantically into one another’s eyes as they stand beneath a many-pointed star or sun, framed within lush tropical vegetation. Elegantly dressed in an evening dress and suit, the two lovers occupy a fantastical dreamscape, the glistening surface adding a mystical sheen. Evoking the tale of primordial man and woman, or the Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Ofili’s painting inserts black subjects into the biblical myth of creation. Casting them as protagonists within the canon of Western art history, Afromantics paints an empowering expression of black love and liberation.

Rendered in the tricolour of red, black and green, the palette originates from the Pan-African flag of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (U.N.I.A.), which was founded by the Jamaican-born black nationalist Marcus Garvey during the 1920s. Symbolising the blood, skin and land of African people, the flag speaks to Garvey’s early activism and its later importance for the Black Power Movement. In the present work, Ofilli places black subjects at the centre of an elaborate creationist myth, playing up the idealism of Garveyism and Pan-African philosophy. “Marcus Garvey’s idea was of going back to Africa not so much as a place but somewhere mentally where you can be happy,” Ofili has explained; “That is why my lovers are in a beautiful place that we can all recognise from the cheapest magazines to the most classic of films. It’s a state of mind, a place which as the title of the [series], Within Reach, kind of says is something that is graspable at certain moments in life” (Chris Ofili quoted in: Fiachra Gibbons, ‘Artist's bold display of black power takes Venice by storm’, The Guardian, 13 June 2003, p. 3).

In 2003 Ofili collaborated with Ghanian-British architect David Adjaye for the extraordinary summation of the series: an installation for the British Pavillion at the 50th Venice Biennale. Ofili had worked with Adjaye to create his critically acclaimed installation, The Upper Room, at Victoria Miro Gallery in 2002 (now in the Tate collects ion). One year later, Ofili once again took up the immersive and sacred for his series of Edenic Within Reach paintings. With Adjaye’s help, Ofili transformed the British Pavilion: Carpet was laid on the floors and the walls were painted in deep shades of red, black and green. At the center of Ofili’s ambitious tricolour installation was the sequence of paintings to which the present work belongs. On the ceiling, a similarly tinted Murano glass sculpture, Afro Kaleidoscope, crowned the central chamber into which red and green Venetian light streamed through central skylight. Outside the Pavilion, Ofili chose to fly his own version of the Union Jack in which the national colours of red, white and blue are replaced for those of Pan-Africanism. Titled Union Black and jointly inspired by David Hammons’ similarly doctored Star-Spangled Banner, U.N.I.A. Flag (1990, MoMA), and British historian Paul Gilroy’s influential book, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), Ofili’s work similarly unpacks issues surrounding national identity, post-colonial history and ideological/geographical boundaries. Described by Enwezor as “one of the most complete artistic projects in the history of the Venice Biennale”, Within Reach offered a final glorious opportunity for Ofili to explore the admixture of Pop culture, racial stereotype, humour and art historical archetype that had brought him international prominence. (Okwui Enwezor, “Shattering the Mirror of Tradition: Chris Ofili’s Triumph of Painting at the 50th Venice Biennale,” David Adjaye, Chris Ofili, New York 2009, p. 152)

The subject of fervent critical acclaim, the exhibition marked a crescendo for the series and his career. Rendered with poetic delicacy and expressed powerfully, the present work captures Ofili’s unapologetic celebration of black identity. Gracefully composed, exquisitely layered and intensely laboured, Afromantics is a work of sheer opulence, hailing from one of the artist’s career defining moments.