If Manet or Degas depicted contemporary subjects in baroque outfits, it might look something like Ly

If Manet or Degas depicted contemporary subjects in baroque outfits, it might look something like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings. The exquisite painterliness of her portraits is virtually unmatched; the images fully reveal the process of their making and yet somehow transcend it. In fact, Yiadom-Boakye’s works are not portraits, but rather depictions of composite figures born completely from her own imagination. Her version of painting revels in its complete subjectivity, something she equates loosely with jazz. “The fantasies, nonsenses and random associations in my head meld with the life I live and the things that happen around me,” she has said. “It is necessarily flawed, histrionic, emotional, intuitive, illogical, personal, and largely lost when translated into words.” This helps understand her poetic titles, too, which suggest narrative threads not immediately connected to the paintings but no doubt enhance our pleasure in consuming them. This embrace of irresolution and emotion is precisely what makes her figures so compelling, so alive—perhaps suggesting she has accessed some truth unavailable to those who pursue “realistic” transcription. Like several of the artists I’ve written about so far, Yiadom-Boakye is subjected to a constant barrage of racializing interpretations, which cast her works as radically political for the simple fact of setting their black subjects in a more classical idiom. Take one step back and you realize the absurdity of such a proposition, its unchecked assumption of a white gaze, and how far the canon has yet to come.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, A Passion Like No Other, 2012