LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE (B. 1977)

It is the Night, as the Fox knows it.
The Night as only the Fox can
understand it. Black and heavy
and hungry and desperate.
The Fox, fear diminished and dignity
crumbling, no longer cares who
sees him. In better times, he’d
revelled in his own cunning.
Plans of The Night (Part II), Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Leaning towards the viewer with warm candor, the sitter of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Black Allegiance To The Cunning invites us into his pictorial space. Curled between his legs at the foot of the painting—with its unmistakable whiskered muzzle, russet fur, and pointed ears—is a fox. Its paws and bushy tail rest languidly against the cold checkerboard tiles, and, in an uncanny mirroring of the male subject’s smile, reveals a flash of vibrant red tongue. As is the case with all her paintings, Yiadom-Boakye reminds us that this is a scene of fiction. Her figures are conjured from an alchemy of imagination, memory, improvisation, and found visual material. Testament to its significant place amongst her oeuvre, the present work was selected as the very first painting visitors would see in her critically acclaimed retrospective, Fly In League With The Night, at Tate Britain, London, which travelled to Moderna Museet, Stockholm, K20, Düsseldorf and MUDAM, Luxembourg between 2020 and 2023. Offering a glimpse into the artist’s enigmatic painterly world, it boasts the eccentricity and technical rigor that have earned Yiadom-Boakye global recognition as one of the most important artists working today.

"I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about." Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Born in London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents, Yiadom-Boakye studied painting at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and completed her BA at Falmouth College of Arts, Cornwall. Her canvases play host to a vibrant troupe of dancers, acrobats, and musicians, as well as a menagerie of birds and animals. A cast of actors in their own right, these creatures often function as familiars—displaced surrogates or foils—for their sitters. They betray motives, feelings, and innermost thoughts. Foxes have skulked their way into numerous paintings, draped over shoulders as taxidermy stoles, and onto pages of Yiadom-Boakye’s prose as stealthy, omniscient observers. Here, extracted from the city’s streets and placed into an intimate, domestic scene, the nocturnal outcast quietly guards its pictorial territory. Yiadom-Boakye makes a playful nod to the great portraitists of art history through such devices.

"Painting for me is the subject. The figures exist only through paint, through color, line, tone and mark-making." Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Employing a dark, earthy palette of brown, ocher, and burnt umber pigments, Yiadom-Boakye’s practice acknowledges a strong pedigree of artists, from Old Masters such as Goya, Velázquez, Hals and Sargent to Modernists including Manet, Degas and Sickert. Sharing an interest in the physicality of paint, these painters crucially mastered the representation of space—its airiness and shadows —as well as form. Yiadom-Boakye captures vacant rooms, and their imagined inhabitants wear muted clothes, or perhaps don extravagant ruffs and stockings, vivid red dresses and pink suits. Stripped of superfluous contents, her paintings dispel time and space. Instead, a dramatic, chiaroscuro gloam suffuses her scenes with an almost Jacobean theatricality. Standing at a height of nearly seven feet, Black Allegiance To The Cunning presents its own stage set, complete with a single stool for a prop. It is in such mysterious, undetermined spaces that the artist’s rich brushwork comes to the fore.

A writer as well as a painter, Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits express a commitment to story and narration over the rendering of physical likeness. Her painted subjects “push themselves forward, into the imagination—as literary characters do,” novelist Zadie Smith has written, “surely, in part, because these are not real portraits … They are character studies of people who don’t exist” (Z. Smith, “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s Imaginary Portraits”, The New Yorker, 12 June 2017). Indeed, she paints swiftly, often completing canvases in one sitting as though putting words on a page. Language infiltrates her paintings in poetic titles and is deftly used as an additional material, as opposed to an explanation. Her two practices function in dialogue. Responding to her short story “Plans Of The Night”—a fable-like account of a fox’s hunt for food in a hostile urban environment—the present painting pledges allegiance to the cunning. “Hungry and desperate”, the watchful fox learns to adapt, to swallow fear as a means of survival, and becomes a metaphor for black identity (L. Yiadom-Boakye, “Plans Of The Night”, Verses After Dusk,
"exh. cat. Serpentine Gallery, London, 2015, p. 88). Enchanting and steeped in significance, the present work is a triumph of
"Yiadom-Boakye’s creative power.