HELIOLITH

I went to see the Kehinde Wiley exhibit yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum during the blizzard. It was amazing, really. In “Passing/Posing” the artist paints these gorgeous vibrant portraits of young black men. They dress in their own clothes, basketball jerseys and jeans, gold chains and cellphones. They choose poses from art books, from older portraits, and Williams snaps a picture of them and then paints them later. He incorporates background themes from Islamic art that overlap with shopping mall decor. They are religious in gesture and gaze, and many of the latter are direct; it’s an interesting dovetail with feminist art criticism: “the gaze.” They are so beautiful. It’s delicious to see blackness celebrated and adored and enlarged. Two of the paintings have tiny interlacing silver squiggles, sperm twisting over the backdrop and edging onto the subjects forms. Masculinity. Virility. One of the most interesting aspects is Wiley’s choice to include the brand names of the subjects’ clothing. The blurb on the wall explains that they suggest not only the relationship between black men in current urban culture and the market, consumerism, but also the idea of branding from slavery, the branding of cattle, of chattel. It’s really an incredible connection. In an interview, he discusses the mental genesis for this project. He was working in upper Manhattan and came across some police sketches. The material for this collection emerged from the problematizing of one of the most frequent representations of young black men. I can normally appreciate the argument that critical art makes, but seldom can I find aesthetic beauty in those argumentative paintings. Kehinde Wiley, however, succeeds in voicing a highly critical message against the canon of portraiture, and simultaneously painting the most gorgeous, bright and captivating images.