Kehinde Wiley doesn’t hide his light under a bushel: He makes big, loud paintings. His fabulous technique combines mastery of traditional drawing, monumental scale, brilliantly saturated colors, and carefully controlled explosions of multiple, intricately clashing, decorative patterns. The room of Wileys at the CJM was like stepping into a seething, noisy but lively and fun market in a strange city.
Which is the point, exactly. These paintings are part of The World Stage, an ongoing project of portraying Black men around the world. Wiley has done portraits in Brazil, China, Nigeria, Sri Lanka and these were all from Israel—Ethiopian Jews, mostly, but also—Wiley isn’t doctrinaire—Israelis of Arab and European descent.
If this sounds suspiciously like recreational colonialism, the tricky ethics of the project is further complicated by the ardent erotic charge. Without being the least bit lewd or porn-y, they’re about as homoerotic as pictures can be. The curators at the CJM have been brave.
What rescues the work from the charge of sexual tourism is that the eroticism is, for Wiley, a means rather than an end in itself. Rather than being anything to apologize for, Wiley’s cruise-y gaze grounds in the concretely personal work that might otherwise be glib. Think of Raphael’s regard for shy Italian girls, or Watteau’s eye for intelligent court ladies: it leads to a more subtle psychological characterization, and a more acute realization of the milieu.
The personal charge, and the psychological acuity and attentiveness to details become the solid foundation for Wiley’s latest venture. The introductory video shows Wiley visiting a club in Tel Aviv, admiring the kids rapping in Aramaic and Hebrew. There's something reasuring about the good-nature with which Wiley saunters into the mythological and political minefield of contemporary Israel.
He captures it in his paintings: enmeshing their global youth culture t-shirts with patterns from Torah curtains and traditional paper cut-outs. Even the frames were embellished with verses, commandments and symbolic lions, eyes and hands. Wiley’s jubilant embrace of it all is a vision of hope. The clash of epochs, cultures and patterns, doesn't necessarily end in an annihilating ADD chaos; it can resolve into polyphony, a richer, livelier music.
[Images: Benediter Brikou, 2011; and Leviathan Zodiac, 2011]
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