Artist Yiadom-Boakye presents a portrait of blackness at the Guggenheim

There is something radically powerful about the canvases of artist Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (London, 1977). maybe it’s yours an honest and unapologetic look at blackness, but also his loose like a strong brush stroke. “I think less about the human figures than about the way they are painted,” the English artist, whose family came to Britain from Ghana in the 1980s, often says. And that is that for some time, moreover, he does not reach for natural models, but works on fictitious portraits, which gives the oil a strong timeless character unusually colored with lightness and intimacy.

This does not mean that this abandonment in the everyday moment — this apparent camaraderie, happiness — gives his characters an immediate fullness of spirit, the desired calmness. Sometimes it seems more to exist behind his eyes, his body position, his usual solitude — there are some group portraits —, inner restlessness, as a stubborn memory of the denial — or search or need for affirmation — of one’s own identity. They could have been taken among the multitude of dispossessed Cape Verdean immigrants roaming the most dehumanized suburbs of Lisbon, engrossed in their silence, which inhabits director Pedro Costa’s rigorous film work.

The theatrical background, dresses, shoes, furniture — not even the wild animals that sometimes appear strangely as pets — do not help to place the portrayed characters in a specific time and space. Everything leads the viewer to recreate in observation, which is delivered to the imagination in an attempt to capture these lives, to build a story about them that does not come easily. A writer, poet and short story teller, this creativity flourishes when she names her paintings to add lyricism to the enigmas of her expressive brushwork.

You can see (enjoy) all that, that peculiar community of blackness and much more from this Friday at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, where the exhibition is on display until September 10 There is no such intense sunsetwhich is curated by Lekha Hileman Waitoller and which for the first time brings together a selection of more than sixty paintings and charcoal drawings created between 2020 and 2023 by a London-based artist with conscious and clear African roots.

Paint what you can’t write

Despite his clear commitment to figuration, his message couldn’t be more modern. “I write about things I can’t paint and I paint things I can’t write about” [escribo sobre las cosas que no puedo pintar y pinto las cosas sobre las que no puedo escribir]. This is how Yiadom-Boakye usually describes his search, a search that has little to do with technical precision, that moves in the coordinates of maximum freedom, spontaneity, instinct, and whose goal is more like an attempt capture (reflect) the soul beings whose lives do not align comfortably with the dream of a new life that the West claims to offer. The echo of the blues of writers such as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, Okwui Enwezor and Toni Morrison resonates strongly in his works. So much so that in one of the rooms of the Guggenheim he pays tribute to the literature of some of his inspirations.