The Generosity: Yiadom-Boakye's dark puzzle

Tate Britain - 60 Years Display

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, The Generosity 2010, oil on canvas, 180x200 cm, Tate

A good size, squarish canvas slightly wider than high. Two life-size figures (two muscular dark men) naked but for their white shorts, are bending down toward us within a totally anonymous, non-demarcated space, tonally similar to the colour of their skin - a mixture of brown, dark sepia and greenish hues, which has been laid down on the canvas with very visible, wide, long and expressive, multidirectional brushstrokes. On the left, these strokes leave more white areas, suggesting a pool of light perhaps. There is an impression of velocity, quickness, of making-do, of not being concerned with perfection but with grasping quickly an impression.

The man on our left, on white socks, is just pulling his right one up whilst looking at us intently with his eyebrow raised (this eyebrow has been emphasised by a long white slash, an absence which has become a highlight, and which parallels the white of the eye in an otherwise very dark body); his is a quizzical, or perhaps confrontational, look. The man on our right is also bending but he is completely engrossed in his action, picking up his black left sock from the floor, just before, probably, putting it on; he is not looking at us.

Who are these two men? What are these young, well-toned, and very black characters doing? Where are they? When did this event happen? Why does this moment merit memorialising? Why is this such a dynamic image, so pregnant with possibilities? Narrative possibilities, pictorial possibilities.

The moment depicted is arrested as the painting itself seems to be suspended at an arbitrary point in time. Like the men would perhaps have finished pulling their socks, the painter could have gone on painting, perfecting the background, giving it more “reality” - as much reality as she has given that look, that knowing look.

Of course there are no answers. The title of the painting gives no clues - The Generosity. On the contrary, it enhances the mystery, it adds (as Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has said, “an extra brush mark”. Her titles “emanate from the associations [made] while working on or looking at a painting, but they’re never meant to explain it.“ This extra brush mark seems to me like a springboard for our own imagination to engage in a distinct internal argument. The obliqueness of the title directs us to reason its viability in relation to the image given. The generosity of whom, of what? In which way is this oblique, natural language title, different of a, say, “Untitled”, or “Number 24”, or of one more descriptive like, for example, “Two men pulling their socks” “John and Martin” or “In the gym”. The title does give us yet another permission to start answering those earlier questions in a personal manner, meaningful to us.

The image is strong, memorable. A slice of life one could say - but what life, whose life? (does this really matter?) It comes as a surprise perhaps to learn that Yiadom-Boakye does not use models, nor does she appropriate ready images from the media like Dumas or Tillmans. She is not intent on showing us, make us ponder, a particular person or event. Her extremely compelling, narratively convincing subject matter is always people, women and men, younger rather than old, black people perfectly poised and interesting, ever in movement, frozen on the canvas in the right gesture, with the uncanny look, their body arched so, like these two men. They are all pure fictions, figments of her own imagination, composites of people observed, sketches made, photographs seen, but not for that less real, less substantial, less painterly present. Like the painting masters of old, she is making pictorial flesh people we will recognise without knowing or having the possibility of ascertaining the accuracy of that “likeness”, its connection to an actual living human being, which is what happens in front of most paintings labelled portraits or said to be based on historical people - be them princess Margarita in one of Velazquez’s several paintings of her, Rembrandt’s portraits of his son Titus, Degas’s little anonymous dancers, or Walter Sicker’s 1932 painting, Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of France, based on a photograph of his actress friend (below).

In many of her works, Yiadom-Boakye seems to actively refer back to her painting idols - Degas and Sickert in particular - the dynamic gestures of the former, the complex narratives of the latter, making explicit her interest in painting per se, and what painting can achieve emotionally and intellectually, politically always, through a constructed image. Like any good painting (be it a portrait or any other genre) the key is not in any perceived recognisable likeness to an actual person or thing, but in the actual painting’s truthfulness to itself; the motif actually allowing us to gauge that truthfulness as the result of that form/content tension that any work of art possesses. Yiadom-Boakye has explained that she starts her works often

…with something very simple that poses some kind of a problem or challenge: a color, a composition, a gesture, a particular direction of the light. My starting points are usually formal ones. There is always something in particular that I think about, and the piece grows out of that.

The likeness is imagined but real; its actuality is the canvas itself, and it parallels the reality of drama and literary fiction, and rather obviously of dance. The literary connection is particularly relevant, especially as we learn that Yiadom-Boakye is also a writer, and both activities are in her mind equally important. She writes short stories with titles not unlike those of her paintings (“Problems with the Moon” “Just before Dawn” "An Inquisition to Divine the Necessary Things") and whose texts also seem to hark back stylistically to an earlier symbolic fiction, reminiscent of fables. She has said that she writes what she cannot paint and paints what she cannot write about; writing and painting counter activities, but both, it would seem, imbued with a striking emblematic quality.

It is this emblematic bend of her painting, requiring a very active puzzling by the viewer of the image (the actual paint, the title) that raises it to a memorable status. The final images, her people's painted reality, are seductively elegant, immediate, timeless yet radically of the present moment; the gestures conjured in oil with rapid brushstrokes, wet on wet, are quintessentially of the 21st century, their enactment meaningful beyond our ready comprehension, and the characters depicting those gestures, this life, happen to be all black, like the painter herself. A blackness which still, here and now, sets a number of questions in motion, but which perhaps, although could be considered, are not the most important questions Yiadom-Boakye’s extreme figurative painting is confronting and addressing in her work.