Essays and LettersLynette Yiadom-Boakye

MICHAEL STEVENSON

Essays and LettersLynette Yiadom-Boakye

21 January – 6 March 2010

The imaginary portrait is a peculiar genre that has only

intermittently cropped up in the history of Western painting –

one thinks above all of Fragonard’s ‘figures de fantaisie’ – but has

become increasingly significant in the last couple of decades. I

first began noticing imaginary portraits as a trend in New York

around 1990, when painters like John Currin, Catherine Howe

and Lisa Yuskavage caught my eye. Now, a generation younger

than those artists, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye gives a very different

spin to the genre. For her older contemporaries, the imaginary

portrait was essentially a device motivated by a perverse sort of

formalism, a way for painting to talk about painting – its history,

its conventions, its practice. I see Yiadom-Boakye’s concerns

as being rather different. Not that she is uninterested in her

medium’s capacity for reflexive self-interrogation. But I don’t

think that is her fundamental concern. More important is what

seems to be an almost novelistic impulse in Yiadom-Boakye’s

work. She seems to want to conjure a character, much as

a writer of fiction might, synthesising him or her out of some

imponderable amalgamation of diverse observations from both

life itself and the art of her precursors.

What makes this novelistic impulse all the more surprising – and

more powerful for that – is that, while there are exceptions, most

of Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are of single figures, not of groups.

Because people are not shown interacting with each other, there

is no implication of narrative. The novelistic impulse at work in

these paintings is not a narrative impulse. Nor does she want to

picture the individual as a product of his or her time and place.

Their nebulous settings – one might say, as one often can of the

portraits of Velázquez, that their environment is simply that of

painting itself – isolate the figures from all distracting externalities.

It’s hard even to guess when these people are supposed to have

lived: their generally nondescript clothing tells us they are not

from far in the past, but they may not be entirely contemporary

either; they could as easily have looked this way forty years ago

as today. Rather, Yiadom-Boakye seems to want to avail herself

of the novelist’s privilege of conjuring the complex inner life of

an imaginary person. Always, her characters are posing. They

are trying to present themselves as they would like to be seen.

And yet they show something more or, perhaps it’s better to say,

something other than an easy public face. Perhaps the artist

herself could not say what that something else is – but she saw it,

she knew that it was the thing she meant, and she gave it to the

rest of us to see. I or any other viewer can try to say what that

something is, but only in the realisation that there is no way to

confirm one’s conjecture. That accounts for a fascinating tension

in these paintings: they show us people who are more complex

than we can ever know.

While the painter can communicate the sense that there is

an inner life at work in each of her characters, she cannot – in

contrast to the novelist – pretend to make that life present to us.

Paintings show us the surface of the visible world, not the workings

of the mind. Yet the intense painterliness deployed by Yiadom-

Boakye complicates the viewer’s ability to grasp these surfaces,

for it constantly reminds us that what we are given to see in the

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits

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painting is not after all the flesh of a person’s face, the texture of

their hair or of the fabric of their clothing, but that of paint, of

a once-fluid substance with which the artist has exerted herself

in order to evoke an image. In doing so, it also reminds us that

the image is not inert, but has been charged with intentionality,

with thought, with inwardness. Not the inwardness of the fictional

subject, of course, but of the artist herself. And yet because her

thought was so intently of this imaginary person, that distinction

becomes tenuous: an imaginary man or woman is a vessel for

the artist’s feeling, but in taking shape through this process of

imagining, the feeling has been transformed, has become the

feeling of another.

Barry Schwabsky is the art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international

reviews for Artforum. His books include The Widening Circle: Consequences

of Modernism in Contemporary Art (Cambridge University Press), Vitamin P:

New Perspectives in Painting (Phaidon Press), and Opera: Poems 1981-2002

(Meritage Press).

Barry Schwabsky

5

Piano

2009

Oil on canvas

180 x 160cm

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7

11pm, Thursday

2009

Oil on canvas

200 x 130cm

8

Doves

2009

Oil on canvas

200 x 120cm

9

5am, Cadiz

2009

Oil on canvas

160 x 200cm

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Opening scene: (The smallest of three pigeons leans against a

lamp-post on the corner and watches.)

A couple emerges from the mainline railway station. They are in

very high spirits.

They carry little: she a tan leather handbag (Note to Wardrobe

dept: oversized with a gold clasp, expensive), and he a camera

(Note to Prop dept: enormous lens, analogue, old).

They cross to the bus depot where several people await different

buses in long queues under the bus shelter.

Initially they stand apart from the queues, in the sunshine.

They canoodle, he fusses over her hair, she over his lapels, like

couples do.

(Curious, the smallest of the three pigeons flies up to the top of

the lamp-post for a better view from above.)

She, the female half of the couple (we’ll call her Mary for now),

laughs loudly, intrusively, as if wanting to be noticed. Thus many

of those standing around look over at them, irritated by the

disturbance, as Londoners are irritated by any disturbance.

Mary wears little (Note to Wardrobe: tiny khaki shorts, bare

legs, wooden heels, white vest, brown leather jacket), her hair is

tousled, brown and blonde, and her skin is golden.

Mary clearly eats very little. She is tall and lean with slightly

protruding teeth that seem to have beaten all attempts

at correction. This would not be so noticeable were her

cheekbones less sharp and cheeks less sunken through lack

of food (Note to Casting: find model cum actress cum dancer

cum singer).

(The smallest of the three pigeons leans in a little closer to get a

better look at them. He stifles a chuckle and is not heard.)

Her companion (we’ll call him Joe, no, Geoffroy. He is English,

though of mainland European extraction perhaps) is at least half

a foot shorter than her. He dresses as the idle and inexplicably rich

of London invariably do (Note to Wardrobe: white shirt not tucked

in, dark jeans neither skinny nor slack, jumper tied loosely about

his shoulders, brogues, ironic cufflinks etc).

Geoffroy has two glossy brown curtains of hair, which only partially

obscure a small, pointed and rodent-like face, a handsome and

not particularly likeable face.

Geoffroy has now taken his camera out of its case (Note to Prop

dept: it should be in an old case, brown, battered, worn).

Mary is striking playful poses with Geoffroy’s encouragement.

Geoffroy is taking many photos of her. Mary is confident in front

of the camera. Geoffroy is an animated, if somewhat affected

photographer.

Stage Directions for a Short Tragedy

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(The smallest of the three pigeons is quite beside himself with

laughter by this point, and very nearly loses his balance. He

manages to regain some of his composure, but not all of it.)

Geoffroy and Mary are now very involved with the photo session

and grow increasingly daring with composition, oblivious to the

disdain of the people.

Mary removes her jacket and tosses it onto the bonnet of a nearby

cab, much to the distaste of the cab driver (Note to Casting: a

rotund and ruddy-faced cab driver).

Geoffroy continues snapping.

Mary removes her shoes and shins up the lamp-post, just a little

way up.

Geoffroy takes position beneath her, lying flat on the ground with

his lower body in the road and still snapping, shouting “Bravo,

bravo! Higher!”

(The smallest of the three pigeons can see Mary edging her way

towards him and is not happy about it.)

Mary shimmies higher up the cold metal pole, sinewy coltish

thighs straining to hold on, smiling and waving down.

Geoffroy wants more. “Beautiful! Higher, baby, higher!” His bony

body is writhing about in the gutter, bony little legs akimbo in the

road, shooting Mary from every possible angle.

So the higher Mary goes, the more photos Geoffroy takes. And

the more photos Geoffroy takes the higher Mary feels inspired

to go. They are both very excited. And they are distracted, very

much in their own world.

Hence, Mary has a terrible shock when the pigeon droppings hit

her square in the right eye. So terrible a shock that she falls from

the top of the lamp-post and onto Geoffroy who is still laid out flat

on his back below. And this is just as well as it means they are both

unconscious (or dead) before the double-decker bus rolls around

the corner and over his two little legs, which are still poking out

into the road.

(The smallest of the three pigeons flies off, a little remorseful but

extremely hungry.)

It is a dreadful scene. But the bodies are taken away and everything

is cleaned up nicely.

And when the camera film is developed, all agree that the

photographs are very beautiful.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

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16

Wingbeater

2009

Oil on canvas

200 x 120cm

17

La Cloche

2009

Oil on canvas

200 x 160cm

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20

The World In Accordance With

2009

Oil on canvas

180 x 200cm

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Pleased to Meet You

2009

Installation of 20 paintings

Oil on canvas

42 x 37cm each (framed)

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Catalogue no 48 January 2010

Cover image The World In Accordance With, 2009, detail

Michael Stevenson

Buchanan Building

160 Sir Lowry Road

Woodstock 7925

Cape Town, South Africa

Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500

info@michaelstevenson.com

www.michaelstevenson.com

Editor Sophie Perryer

Design Gabrielle Guy

Photography and image repro Mario Todeschini

Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

BiographyLynette Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977 in London to Ghanaian

parents; she completed her postgraduate studies at the Royal

Academy Schools, London, in 2003. Recent solo shows have

taken place at Faye Fleming & Partner in Geneva (2007 and

2009). Group shows include Living Together: Strategies for Co-

habitation at the Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea,

Vitoria-Gasteiz, and the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo

in Spain (2009); the 7th Gwangju Biennial, Korea (2008); Flow at

the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2008); The Unhomely:

Phantom Scenes in Global Society, the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006-

2007), and Bloomberg New Contemporaries at the Barbican,

London (2004-2005).

Works courtesy of Faye Fleming & Partner, Geneva

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MICHAEL STEVENSON