FACE TIME
What a pleasure it is to step out of the elevator onto the fourth floor of the New Museum and into painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s show. The ceiling is high, the lights are dim, and the walls have been painted blood red and hung with seventeen of the artist’s large-scale oil portraits. Each canvas is about eight feet high and depicts, in slightly larger-than-life scale, a single young black man or woman. They are handsome people, and the gallery shimmers with their physical presence.
It’s well-known that Yiadom-Boakye paints from memory, and the practice gives her work a heightened enigma. Unlike Alice Neel’s portraits, that exaggerate singularities in appearance, Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits endow her sitters with a sublime classical grace. They are supremely poised, remain absolutely still. From the finish of the paint one sees that the subjects’ faces, hands and feet, those parts of the body we expect to reveal character, have been worked with extra effort to get them just right, and yet they don’t reveal anything at all. A ballerina with raised arms closes her eyes. A man lying in bed stares blankly into the middle distance. The subjects’ backdrops also remain a mystery. One man, dressed in black, rests languidly in a flurry of great green brushstrokes. Is he lying in a field of high wild grasses, a flat lawn, or a steep hill? Most figures are simply set against a dark, shadowed background, like a department store photographer’s blank scrim.
As the wall text notes, in ennobling the black figure Yiadom-Boakye fills an unseemly void in art history and the art museum. The sensuality of these paintings – their of-the-body scale, gestural brushstrokes, densely colored surfaces – give them extraordinary charisma. The subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered as if warmed from within. But these paintings don’t depict real people, who come with warts, veins, blemishes, crooked grins, and darting eyes, and pass their days in mussed apartments, sunlit studios, and neighborhood bars. Like many other contemporary painters, Yiadom-Boakye is uninterested in portraiture as a tool to reveal personal character. She holds something back. But when a museum visitor sees these elegant black men and women, she wants, perhaps naively, to know exactly who they are.