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Powerful and beguiling, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Cloister is a stunning exemplar of the artist’s signature mode of enigmatic portraiture. Although depicted on a dramatic scale, the painting is emphatically intimate: depicted in profile, the subject appears lost in thought, unaware of the viewer’s gaze upon his richly painted figures. Conjured from Yiadom-Boakye’s imagination and mediated onto the canvas through her vital creative process, Cloister is a heady concoction of art-historical allusion and elegant forms, fully realizing the potential for figuration to communicate notions of interiority and thought. Executed in 2016, the present work is part of a group of new paintings created for A Passion to A Principle, Yiadom-Boakye’s celebrated solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2016-2017. Describings the artist’s project, one scholar explains: “With bold brushstrokes, Yiadom-Boakye has placed the figure in ambiguous surroundings with an atmospheric quality. Familiar yet foreign, the dreamlike location [they inhabit] suggests endless potential actions to follow the moment depicted.” (Charmaine Marie Branch in Exh. Cat., San Francisco, Museum of the African Diaspora (and travelling), Black Refractions: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 2019, p. 223)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Josef Helfenstein, and Elena Filipovic in conversation at Kunsthalle Basel
With an uncanny ability to forge narrative and mood in her painting, Yiadom-Boakye’s evocative works have made her a finalist for the Turner Prize and earned her the honor of representing Ghana in the 2019 Venice Biennale; underscoring her acclaim, the artist is currently being honored with a major survey of her works at the Tate Britain, a monographic exhibition t.mes d to coincide with an international initiative designed to draw attention to female artists. An exceptionally elegant example from her celebrated body of work, Cloister invites and denies access, occupying the border between the established canon and a productive unknown.
Presenting a subject that is at once unknowable and subconsciously familiar, Cloister endlessly engages the imagination, acting as a generative source for narrative association and speculation. While reminiscent of such familiar figures as Rodin’s The Thinker or van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Yiadom-Boakye’s figure is ultimately anonymous; although trained to paint from live models, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are pulled from her imagination, each a conflation of experiences, memories, and art history. The artist describes her paintings as, “suggestions of people...They don’t share our concerns or anxieties. They are somewhere else altogether.” This lack of a fixed narrative invites viewers to project their own interpretations, thus raising important questions of identity and representation. Often painted in spontaneous and instinctive bursts, her figures seem to exist outside of a specific t.mes or place. Exemplifying Yiadom-Boakye’s focus upon universal notions of interiority and nuances of the cerebral, the subject of Cloister is clearly meditative, wrapped within his own train of thought. His gaze, dark pupils piercing against the bright whites of his eyes, is focused beyond the edge of the canvas—upon a subject inaccessible to the viewer before him. Despite his mysterious anonymity, however, Yiadom-Boakye finds ways to imbue her imaginary sitter with a sense of identity, allowing his distinctive features and compelling posture to give the otherwise unknown character a clear sensibility. Describings the artist’s project in terms highly reminiscent of the present work, acclaimed novelist Zadie Smith reflects: “Subtleties of human personality it might take thousands of words to establish are here articulated by way of a few confident brushstrokes.” (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.”
Private collects ion. Art © The Charles White Archives/ Charles White
Carefully yet urgently composed in Yiadom-Boakye’s signature palette of velvety bronze and rich amber hues, the subject of Cloister glows against his shimmering ground of emerald and forest green hues. He appears virtually carved from the composition in broad, sturdy strokes, recalling the brusque paint application of Manet and Cézanne. Placed at the center of the composition, the physicality of the muscular figure fills the canvas without overwhelming its borders, bespeaking an interest in notions of color and form that has as much to do with abstraction as it does figuration. Although the painting is predominantly composed in darker brown, green, and blue hues, the variety and specificity of Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly touch and choice of tones bestows her painting and figure with an extraordinarily sculptural dimensionality; most notable in the rich variegation of her sitter’s intermittently umber, mahogany, sepia and sienna skin tones, Cloister is both a rigorous formal exercise and renegotiation of race and pictorial representation. In this way, Cloister—and Yiadom-Boakye’s larger oeuvre—achieve a nuanced yet emphatic insertion of black figures into a primarily white, hegemonic tradition of painting. Allowing insight into the conceptual framework for her practice, Yiadom-Boakye has said: “Maybe I think more about black thought than black bodies. When people ask about the aspect of race in the work, they are looking for very simple or easy answers. Part of it is when you think other people are so different than yourself, you imagine that their thoughts aren’t the same. When I think about thought, I think about how much there is that is common” (The artist in conversation with Antwaun Sargent, "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Fictive Figures," Interview Magazine, May 2017)
