Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
The solitude of a Watteau ... A Passion Like No Other by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye from Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain.
The solitude of a Watteau harlequin ... A Passion Like No Other by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye from Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain. Photograph: Collection Lonti Ebers/Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
The solitude of a Watteau harlequin ... A Passion Like No Other by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye from Fly in League with the Night at Tate Britain. Photograph: Collection Lonti Ebers/Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye review – ‘she’s turned Tate Britain on its head’

This article is more than 3 years old

Tate Britain, London
The artist has boldly reclaimed figurative oil painting and filled the gallery with the kind of contemporary art it normally shuns

Looking at Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painting No Such Luxury, I suddenly saw how much she has in common with the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The work depicts a woman sitting at a table with a cup and saucer in front of her, gazing straight out. That seems simple but the longer you look, the stranger it becomes. Magritte portrayed himself in the same pose in his painting The Magician – except with four arms. Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas may seem, by comparison, a slice of real life. But it’s weirdly out of scale, a bit larger than life. The woman is a monument, her gaze mystical and far-seeing – a Buddha of suburbia.

Yet Yiadom-Boakye has a far deeper affinity with Magritte. She makes us believe in someone who does not exist. Everything about her pictures of people says “portrait”. But these are not portraits. They’re fictional creations, imagined characters. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Magritte wrote beneath a painting of a pipe. Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition could have been simply called “This is not a portrait.”

‘This is not a portrait’ ... Citrine by the Ounce, 2014, by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Photograph: Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Her paintings would look great on the covers of Penguin Modern Classics – you could have a lot of fun fitting them to your favourite novels. Pale for the Rapture is a diptych – two canvases side by side – of elegantly dressed men in different but equally conventional poses of melancholy, both resting their faces on their hands while they sit cross-legged on sofas, one of which is upholstered in a diamond pattern, the other in yellow and red stripes. A painting called In Lieu of Keen Virtue “portrays” a bearded young man in a salmon sweater with a cat resting on his shoulder.

Maybe these men are not so much characters in novels as novelist characters – they look like they’re taking a break from a morning’s typing in a 1950s Greenwich Village cafe. Many of the people here could be novelists, poets, philosophers, for Yiadom-Boakye’s real theme seems to be sensitivity itself, the nature of the inner life. Some of the most touching pictures are the simplest. To Tell Them Where It’s Got To shows a woman turning away into the shadows, head lowered in sadness, engrossed in secrets.

This painting, like a number of others, has a deliberately nocturnal palette. Dark jumper, brown background, black hair and black skin. Yiadom-Boakye paints black people, and in the most hallowed of traditional European art forms: oil painting on canvas. No acrylics for her, no collage; no photography or abstraction.

Her paintings would look great on the covers of Penguin Modern Classics ... Complication, 2013. Photograph: Marcus J Leith/Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

She has turned Tate Britain on its head. In a normal year, the Turner prize would currently be revealing the latest video, photography, interactive art and, who knows, maybe a few paintings (Yiadom-Boakye was shortlisted, but didn’t win, in 2012). It’s been cancelled because of the pandemic and here, instead, are room after room of oil paintings. It’s like you’ve taken a wrong turn and ended up in the 18th-century galleries. Except the black people who only play servile, secondary roles in those portraits now occupy the foreground and the high spiritual plane once reserved for white faces in art.

Yiadom-Boakye clearly doesn’t loathe the great tradition of oil painting. She can’t do enough of it. Her approach may pass for postmodern but it is saturated in painterly erudition. For there is a long history of portraits that look like painted fictions, and she knows it – distilling that narrative quality while removing references to actual persons. The Ventricular shows a man in a red shirt spreading his arms over a red sofa, vividly recalling the intimate pastels of Degas while also being a Crucifixion. The young man who stands in a strange medium of aquamarine blueness, as if under water, wearing a frilly collar like a clown in A Passion Like No Other gazes outwards with the intense solitude of the rococo artist Watteau’s triste harlequin Gilles, someone caught on the anxious borderline between theatre and life.

Similarly trapped in the flashlight is the young man in For the Sake of Angels, one of the most “real” paintings here – except it’s another fantasy. Wearing an immaculate white shirt and jacket, harshly illuminated by electric spots, he might be a model on a shoot. But he’s unhappy in the role and turns his face away, casting a bleak shadow on the wall as he suffers in the light. This, too, has its old masterly echoes – specifically how Velázquez captures the sadness of the model in the Rokeby Venus, where a nude showing us her back reveals her misery in a mirror.

A journey into the imagination ... Condor and the Mole, 2011. Photograph: Courtesy of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Light is brutal, public. Shadows hold freedom and introspection. This show is a journey into strange, tenebrous places of the imagination. Again and again Yiadom-Boakye portrays black faces in darkness. It’s her deepest foray into the past of painting: into the realm of chiaroscuro, the melting luxury of shadows that reached its apogee in the Dutch golden age, when Rembrandt and his pupils basked in nighttime settings that intimate the soul.

One of the most sensitive of all Dutch 17th-century paintings, in the Wallace Collection in London, is by Rembrandt’s follower Govaert Flinck . It’s known as The Young Archer and portrays a young African. Flinck focuses on his pensive, private expression and makes him a figure of soulfulness set in chiaroscuro. But he’s no more real than Yiadom-Boakye’s people. Dutch golden age artists often painted fictional personages. They were interested in the expressive potential of the human, beyond any banal concept of “portraiture”. There’s even a name for this genre, the tronie.

So what Yiadom-Boakye is doing is painting tronies. Like Flinck, she reveals that a picture of someone can be so much more that the banal record of her, him, they – so much more than a selfie. These are paintings of states of being, states of the human soul. They don’t always work. Some of the group paintings seem silly compared with the studies in solitude. But my God, what guts to reclaim figurative painting in oils, on such a stupendous scale, filling Tate Britain with the kind of art, in terms of contemporary work, that it usually goes a long way to avoid. And serious painters who stick with it improve with age. So look forward to when she’s a living old master. Although in so many ways, she already is.

  • Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly in League With the Night is at Tate Britain, London, 2 December until 9 May.

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed