Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk exhibition review – vibrant paintings which pull in the viewer

Ben Luke found himself speculating about the inner worlds of Yiadom-Boakye's skillfully painted figures time and again at this lyrical exhibition
Vigorous expression: Any Number of Preoccupations, 2010 (Picture: Todd-White Art Photography)
Todd-White Art Photography
Ben Luke3 June 2015

This exhibition reveals an artist who just gets better and better: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's newest exhibitions deals with the human figures. Her medium is paint, pushing and pulling it here and there, with veils, drips and smudges, delicate detail and vigorous expression.

Born in London to Ghanaian parents in 1977, she is steeped in the history of painting, and particularly portraiture. Yiadom-Boakye’s figures are not specific people but fictional constructions, often in the process of being formed or defined. They evoke her influences and often have enigmatic or literary titles — Citrine by the Ounce, Coterie of Questions — which add to the paintings’ lyrical mystery and rich atmosphere.

At the heart of her work is the representation of blackness within the historic fabric of painting, from which they are otherwise largely absent. Think of how, in many great portraits by Rembrandt, Velázquez and others, white faces loom up out of obscure, infinite, dark backgrounds. Yiadom-Boakye’s work is the same, but because she portrays people with black skin, she brilliantly subverts this time-honoured device.

Sometimes she leaves patches of a light ground beneath the background visible to create beautiful highlights, as in the painting The Matches (2015), with its golden glints around the shoulders of the woman with her back to us. At others, she pushes it to near-invisibility — at first, the figure in 4am Friday (2015) is only identifiable by a stripy T-shirt and the whites of his or her eyes. It takes some investigation, looking at the painting from different angles, to see the complete figure.

Sophisticated use of colour: Interstellar
PRESS IMAGE

It makes the experience of looking at Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings a very physical one: you are pulled into the picture. This closer engagement also reveals her sophisticated use of colour — at first the paintings look almost monochrome with occasional bursts of brightness but they often bring together a wide and subtle range of hues, as in Coterie of Questions (2015), whose patchwork of earthy greens and browns accentuates the pink of the figure’s T-shirt and the deep blue of his jeans. What the questions in the title might be is anyone’s guess: the figure seems lost in thought, his eyes closed. Is his reverie happy? Is that a half-smile on his lips?

Time and again, you find yourself speculating about the inner worlds of these figures. Only when the figures are less ambiguous, as in Interstellar (2012), do they lose their magnetism.

At its best, figurative painting finds a balance between the vitality of the figure and the vibrancy of the paint itself. I can’t think of anyone around today who’s doing it better than Yiadom-Boakye.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Verses After Dusk, Serpentine Gallery (020 7402 6075, serpentinegalleries.org) until Sept 13. Tuesday – Sunday and Bank Holidays 10am-6pm. Admission free

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