With respect to raw chops, his work is starting to approach that of some big hitters, such as John Currin or Odd Nerdurm.  Very few young painters, however, have dealt with the subtle, rich qualities of skin tone, facial expressions, and the human form as well KehindeWiley, though others are coming close—remember Alex Melamid’s “Holy, Hip-Hop!” show at Forum (and at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit) last year.

In The World Stage: Brazil exhibition, Wiley executes large-scale paintings of handsome, young, black men set against elaborately patterned backgrounds of tropical flowers and/or rococo-wallpaper designs. His models are posed in positions imitating the sitters of Old-World paintings or historic monuments, displaying attitudes of conquest and leadership.

Beyond the mere craftsmanship, however, Wiley’s understanding of art history and his commitment to new ideas is surprisingly refreshing.  George Santayana’s famous quote seems to apply to art as much as it might apply to politics,  "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Wiley’s knowledge of historic paintings and specifically portraiture, gives him the power to quote, without repeating, to use historic ideas to address pressing contemporary realities.  Wiley says, “Often times when I go to the great museums throughout the world, most of the pictures on the wall don’t happen to look like me.  In my pictures I’m trying to sort of correct for a bit of that. My job as an artist is not to paint the world as a type of Utopia.   What I do is I respond to the world that I’m given.”

With this body of work, Wiley has ventured south to Brazil in search of his subjects and by doing so has taken his dialog about power, race, society, and sexuality beyond the historic and geographic confines of an African-American experience. He is attempting to challenge, reverse, and possibly lampoon the tenets of Old-World prejudices and social hierarchies as expressed through traditional portraiture and, in this case, through early New World propaganda.

Wiley says “I use a number of sources in the work.  Part of it is religious iconography and religious painting.  But the other part has to do with society portraits.  In those paintings, it’s more about the landed gentry.  The very powerful rich white men on their land looking confident and strident.  There is a language of power that is in those paintings.  Ultimately, what I’m trying to do is to craft a language that investigates that type of power.”

His characters are larger than life, cocky and sometimes flamboyant young men gazing casually into the viewer’s eye.  The mere size of these paintings exaggerates their presence, “infusing his paintings,” according to Thelma Golden, Director of the Studio Museum, in Harlem, “with his own sense of how monumental he feels his subjects are.”

But Wiley takes it further by over-accentuating the feminine qualities of the traditionally masculine strength within old European art.  He explains, “As a culture, we have in some ways codified the decorative as belonging to the feminine.  And I am depicting young black men who are perceived as being hyper-sexual with a propensity toward sports and anti-social behavior.  These things are codified as being very masculine and by juxtaposing that with something that is seen as being feminine, I think we sort of blast through both.  A type of supernova that lays bare the absurdity of these codes to begin with.”   

Viewing his work, we begin realize the conspicuous absence of black men in art history, a realization that Wiley had growing up in Los Angeles.  He recalls, “When I was a kid, I would often times go to the Huntington Library and Gardens where there was an amazing collection of 17th and 18th Century British portraiture.   As an artist, I always look at these great masters as the ‘father that you must slay’ and put yourself into the picture [instead].”

As a burgeoning celebrity in his own right, Wiley’s opening night at ROBERTS & TILTON was a packed Hollywood-style event with lots of fashion and posturing.  Fortunately, however, it possessed equal amounts of sincerity and content.  Mingling among the TV celebs and art-hipsters were world-class curators such as Simon Watson, who helped break out Wiley in New York, and Max Presneill of the Torrance Museum of Art, along side collectors such as Michael Ovitz, of CAA fame, and Gerald Casale from DEVO.   Refreshingly, most people were actually looking at the art instead of each other…and for good reason.

-Bryson Strauss

Kehinde Wiley
The World Stage: Brazil
ROBERTS & TILTON
April 4 – May 30 2009

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