Wiley Conquers the ‘World Stage’

When Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977) began exhibiting his portraits of young African-American males some five years ago, they hit a cultural sweet spot, bringing a hip-hop swagger into the gallery, and propelling the Yale-trained artist to international renown. But these large oils were not just photo-realist pictures of black men in hoodies and baggy jeans: They had a sophisticated conceptual underpinning, which only further endeared them to critics and collectors. Mr. Wiley had asked his models to page through art-history books and select the poses in which they would like to be depicted, resulting in poses from the grand-manner portraiture of Gainsborough and Ruebens.Mr. Wiley began that series of portraits while he was an artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, in 2001-02. More recently he has undertaken a “World Stage” series, for which he moves to and opens a studio in a country in order to both learn from the local population and to engage with its public sculpture. Ten of those new works, all finished in 2008, form “The World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar,” fittingly Mr. Wiley’s first solo exhibition at the Studio Museum.Again, the models are all black men posing. That Mr. Wiley is gay certainly influences his choice of subjects — men have always taken both the male and female roles in his compositions — yet in the Africa series, at least, the implications of his all-male cast are richer than mere sexual preference. A Nigerian, his father returned to his country, from Los Angeles, before the artist was born. Mr. Wiley never met or saw a picture of his father. Traveling to West Africa, “the genetic home of the African-American population,” as he puts it in a fascinating interview in the show’s catalog, was a way of reconnecting with his father and his broader ancestry.The poses his models assume are based on local public sculptures, which themselves draw on a number of traditions, from European colonial styles to the Soviet Socialist aesthetic to local sculptural styles. “Dogon Couple” reprises the pose found in a traditional Dogon sculpture of a man and wife. In the painting, a Senegalese man in a blue sleeveless T-shirt, plaid shorts, and sandals sits with hands in the male position, with the knuckles facing out; like the female in the source sculpture, his companion, in a soccer shirt and shorts, wraps his right arm around his friend’s shoulder and offers his left hand to the viewer palm-out. Each sits in a red chair amid an ornate background with a red-and-orange, bird-and-leaf motif.All the canvases employ such decorative background motifs. In most, however, they don’t remain in the background. Perhaps the most startling of the images, because of its title, “Benin Mother and Child,” depicts a man in jeans and a denim shirt holding what looks like two wicker baskets, which are similar to the objects held by the woman in a sculpture of the same name. (The catalog helpfully reproduces five of the source images.) The man stands in front of a blue-and-white pattern with large red leaves on it. Several of the red leaves are painted over the figure, enveloping him.A background pattern of vines and leaves comes forward to cover much of the legs of two boys, who hold opposite ends of a yellow shirt in their raised hands, in “Place Soweto (National Assembly).” Yet far from unifying the canvas, the relationship of figure to ground remains problematic, as does the relationship between concept and execution.Conceptually, Mr. Wiley’s approach is subtle, complex, and powerful. As he indicates in the interview, he’s too intelligent an artist merely to make straightforward political statements: “I try to use the black body in my work to counter the absence of that body in museum spaces … But the work also resists any type of normalizing or corrective impulse that you might expect a young black artist to investigate.” He’s not out to right the wrongs of the past — as any realist does, he’s seeking to portray the heroism of everyday people, black people. Yet when he states that he’s “more engaged … with the possibilities of easel painting” than with the social or conceptual implications of his work, he loses me.If he is an excellent thinker, Mr. Wiley is, at best, only a competent painter. His idealized figures, enhanced through Photoshop, have a photographic quality that distances them; they seem almost like wax figures. Worse, they have no organic relationship to their backgrounds, which are relentlessly flat; the highly modeled figures seem to float free of them. And that’s why, I suspect, Mr. Wiley uses the optical trick of enveloping his figures in the vegetation of the ground patterns — to yank them back into the picture plane. It is ironic that such a conceptually astute artist would get bogged down in one of painting’s oldest conceptual problems: how to create productive tension between the flatness of the canvas and the depiction of three-dimensional space.That said, even if all their elements don’t resolve perfectly, the 10 paintings by Mr. Wiley on view here do combine for a sizzling show. He is a wily artist indeed.Until October 26 (144 W. 125th St., between Lenox and Seventh avenues, 212-864-4500).

Wiley Conquers the ‘World Stage’

Wiley Conquers the ‘World Stage’

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