Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and the Liberation of Figurative Painting

In November of 2020, in a very small window of time between the opening of the exhibition and another national COVID lockdown, I was able to see Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s show at the Tate Britain, Fly in League with the Night (now currently showing again until February 26th, 2023). A lonely time for many of us, the show felt transcendent for me to explore, mask-clad and careful of social distancing. Intimate and enigmatic, Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings felt like being face-to-face with a familiar stranger. 

Upon entering the second room, I was taken by the monumental No Such Luxury (2012) and its elegant tonal range of browns. A Tate security guard was standing in front of it, staring intently. The picture has an immediacy, whether you’re standing just in front of it or across the room. The figure seems to sit across from you, sharing a cup of coffee at a cafe, deep in conversation, and untouched by our social reality. The figure is of indeterminate gender, a fact I only realised after spending quite a bit of time looking. While it may seem innocuous, for gender to be such an afterthought is quite an accomplishment in figurative painting.

This sense of freedom permeates Yiadom-Boakye’s work. The figures are clearly and celebratorily Black--her range of browns is sumptuous and her oeuvre is an exercise in technique perhaps more than anything else. But beyond that, they are free--free from social injustices, prejudice, categorisation, but also free from narrative and interpretation. This is because Yiadom-Boakye’s figures are imagined. Despite their lifelike gazes, their individualised expressions, she paints them from memory or found images. The figures are also deliberately free from any historicising elements--she famously does not paint them with shoes, in order to create a sense of timelessness in the works. 

To liberate them even more, she pairs them with a poetic title, one that deliberately does not have to do with the subject, but suggests a fantasy narrative in the viewer’s mind. As a painter and poet, Yiadom-Boakye mixes up the media, creating poetry in painting. As such, there is no wall text in the exhibition. Nothing to distract oneself with. Yiadom-Boakye has curated a Spotify playlist to listen to while wandering the exhibition, so my discovery was accompanied by Miles Davis and Solange. Truthfully, this is a relief. While there is rightfully an emergence of Black artists in London’s major art institutions in the past few years, I have found many of these exhibitions to be over-contextualised. Stories of Black suffering and oppression are crucial, and art offers a valuable medium through which to foster understanding. And yet, without the counterbalance of Black beauty, Black joy, how do we really have the full picture? The contextualisation of Blackness often comes dangerously close to justification for its visibility. Yiadom-Boakye seems to offer a soft space for joy and beauty, but one that is clearly intimate and separate to me. I am not a part of the paintings. They open to me like glimmering windows, but the figures inhabit their own space and suggest that they will continue on in their private worlds long after I have finished looking. As Yiadom-Boakye states in the catalogue, 

‘Blackness has never been other to me. Therefore, I've never felt the need to explain its presence in the work any more than I've felt the need to explain my presence in the world, however often I'm asked…

‘Following my own nose and doing as I damned well pleased always seemed to me to be the most radical thing I could do. It isn’t so much about placing Black people in the canon as it is about saying that we’ve always been here, we’ve always existed, self-sufficient, outside of nightmares and imaginations, pre-and post discovery, and in no way defined or limited by who sees us.’

I am here, looking, but my gaze does not activate the paintings. They are infinite, expansive, complete.

It is worth noting the tension that Yiadom-Boakye’s work inhabits in regards to the technique versus the ‘subject matter’. Yiadom-Boakye studied art in the 1990s, at a time when painting was well and truly ‘dead’, in favour of the ‘concept’. Technique, or craft, was seen as redundant. So in insisting on painting portraiture, Yiadom-Boakye carved out a radical space for herself. Now that painting has become a resurrected medium in the last 5 years, she stands as a pillar of contemporary art. 

However, many contemporary painters seem to be celebrated on condition of their identities, and the way those identities are made visible in their subject matter. In Zadie Smith’s brilliant essay on the artist, she notes the racial politics underlying the reemergence of figurative painting. 

‘Many critics have noted that this return to ‘painterly capacity’ is particularly notable in Black artists, and, strange indeed, that they should be the gateway--the permission needed--to return to the figurative, to the possibility of virtuosity! Why this might be the case is a fraught question, and Yiadom-Boakye, in her interview with Beckwith, proves herself slyly aware of its implications: ‘How many times have I heard from someone saying, ‘You’re lucky. You were born with a subject. Well, isn’t everyone?’

And yet Yiadom-Boakye’s practice seems to defy the categorisation of a subject. Blackness is inherent in them, but it is explored via technique. A genuine discovery of paint and its possibilities. Perhaps technique has become so gauche in the art world that we have forgotten the virtue of it; and if painting is tied to subject then technique must always be interpreted as aiding the concept. What Yiadom-Boakye has attempted then, is to liberate technique from subject matter without rejecting figuration. 

Smith goes on:

What Yiadom-Boakye does with brown paint and brown people is indivisible. Everyone is born with a subject, but it is fully expressed only through a commitment to form, and Yiadom-Boakye is a committed to her kaleidoscope of browns as Lucien Freud was to the veiny blues and the bruised, sickly yellow that was his life’s work to reveal, lurking under all that pink flesh. In his case, no one thought to separate form from content, and Yiadom-Boakye’s work is, among other things, an attempt to insist on the same aesthetic unities that white artists take for granted. 

Since the pandemic, I have found myself craving beauty in art more than anything else. I sometimes feel ashamed about this. I don’t believe that art must be beautiful; nor do I believe that every beautiful artwork is worth looking at, and I constantly urge my students to overcome the impulse to reject work they don’t enjoy looking at. So I have been thinking hard about what beauty really is for me, and I have come to the conclusion that beauty is transcendence. Yiadom-Boakye’s work was so meaningful for me because there are so many layers of transcendence within it. It transcends reality, time, narrative, and the separation between literature and visual art. It transcends the expected relationship between technique and subject matter, particularly for Black artists. It transcends the way that the contemporary art world seeks to categorise Black art. It transcends white interpretation of Blackness. It transcends: it offers a space to just be with beautiful painting. This is why this exhibition is the best things I have seen in a long time.