The Fictive Portrait
The people in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye's paintings don't exist. They are composite figures built from images and imaginations, from the history of portraiture, from a deep engagement with how paint can be made to describe a person without having a specific person to describe. The names she gives them — the titles of her works — are invented names, occasionally poetic phrases, never identifiers. You cannot recognize who you're looking at. And yet you feel, standing in front of these paintings, that you know them.
Yiadom-Boakye is British-Ghanaian, trained at Central Saint Martins and Falmouth, working now in London and Cornwall. Her paintings are all figurative — all depicting Black figures in interior settings or against neutral grounds, in poses that suggest a moment caught between one action and another, in states of rest or reflection or something unnamed. They are painted quickly: she reportedly completes most canvases in a single day, and the speed is visible in the handling, in the directness of the mark-making, in the surfaces that have a freshness that belies the historical intelligence behind them.
The relationship to the history of portraiture is explicit and complex. Yiadom-Boakye has absorbed the tradition — from Velázquez through Manet through Sargent — and applies its vocabulary to subjects that the tradition historically excluded. Black figures painted with the authority and technical facility reserved in the tradition for wealthy white patrons. The formal homage is inseparable from the political reclamation.
The Missing
The missing in my headline is a strange thing to say about people who never existed. But the experience of standing in front of Yiadom-Boakye's paintings has that quality — a recognition that produces something like loss, a feeling of knowing someone who is not there.
This might be what all good portraiture does. The portrait freezes a moment, presents a person as they were at a specific instant, and the viewing of it is always also a confrontation with absence — with the fact that the person is elsewhere now, older, different, or dead. The portrait is a document of presence that produces awareness of absence.
For Yiadom-Boakye's fictive subjects this logic is collapsed and intensified. The absence is total — they never existed, so the presence the painting gives them is the only presence they have. The painting is not a document of someone but the creation of someone. This gives the figures a peculiar intensity. They exist only here. They are entirely dependent on the paint for their being.
The Speed and What It Means
Painting quickly doesn't mean painting carelessly. The one-day practice requires extraordinary confidence and technical facility — there is no time for overworking, for second-guessing, for the kinds of revision that slower painting allows. Every decision has to be right or at least right enough, and the rightness has to be achieved through accumulated skill rather than iterative correction.
The surfaces of the paintings show this. They have a character — the specific quality of paint applied with speed and certainty — that distinguishes them from similar work made more slowly. The handling is direct without being crude, quick without being careless. The figures emerge from the ground with a kind of inevitability that feels like discovery rather than construction.
I've been following her work for several years and each new encounter adds something to my understanding of what she's doing. The consistency of the project — the sustained attention to a set of formal and conceptual problems — produces a body of work that is more than the sum of individual paintings.
She makes you miss people who were never there. That's something. That might be everything.
I've been following her work for several years and each new encounter adds something to my understanding of what she's doing. The consistency of the project — the sustained attention to a set of formal and conceptual problems — produces a body of work that is more than the sum of individual paintings.
She makes you miss people who were never there. I don't have better language for the experience. The missing is real. The people aren't. The gap between those two facts is where the painting lives.
