Contemporary Portraits: Part Two

Greg Thorpe

This is the second instalment of a two-part article focusing on the uses of portraiture in the work of six contemporary artists. I’ve married each to a particular theme, giving a lens through which we might appreciate one particular strand of their work. The previous article considered Grace Enemaku and Black Girl Magic, Hobbes Ginsberg and Gender, and Shaun Leonardo and Violence, unwittingly finding connections between them in the personal/political projections of each artist’s imaging. These might be self-celebratory or in anguished fragmentation, but are consistently in opposition to their prevailing social conditions.  Part One also posited that we are alive in the Age of the Portrait – a time in which smartphone technology plus social media plus collective hyper-awareness of image have combined to create the most documented generations ever living. So, what is there left for contemporary artists to do? How are artists staking fresh claims on the portrait, and to what ends? Here are three new considerations. 

Gillian Wearing and Solitude

It will be a while (I hope) before the public finds its appetite for witty COVID radio dramas, postmodern coronaviral novels or wacky rom-coms about life in lockdown. For some reason, however, Gillian Wearing’s lockdown self-portraits are right on the money when it comes to craving some recognition for our mass isolation experience. There’s no doubt that projections of our self-image have changed gradually in the pandemic. Many of us gaze at ourselves all week long on Zoom or Teams or Skype, in that inescapable digital mirror. Online is also the place where colleagues can now see the clothes we wear at home and where we eat our breakfast. In some senses, the edges of the self/selves that we choose to present have become much more malleable as domesticity/work/leisure all occur in the same confined places. The arena has suddenly changed concerning how and where we want to be seen.

The endless flat presence of the on-screen self produces a sense of spreading ourselves thin, and it’s accompanied by another new sensation; the sudden snap back into solitude that happens immediately after an online gathering ends. The brain is fooled into thinking we are in company and the body pines for oxytocin. The digital interface, as scientists have found, cannot synthesise production of this critical bonding hormone. In fact, you are more alone than ever. These are the rollercoaster experiences that account for our long hours in the lounge, at the dinner table, on our beds. The new domestic solitude, the art of waiting and wanting, is captured and amplified in Wearing’s series of pandemic self-portraits. The artist reclines upon pillows and gazes up at us, or lies on the floor staring into middle distance, or looks at herself askance in the mirror – poses that we recognise and reproduce.

Wearing has previously made use of the mask in various forms to arrive counter-intuitively at what a portrait can mean, and what it can say about a sitter. On the other side of that exploration, she now returns to painting herself, her body, and her own face unadorned, over and over in a range of postures and styles. Because, what else is there?

‘Lockdown Portrait 3’ seems especially to capture the peculiar emotional cocktail of stillness and tension we now imbibe; a sense of quiet pressure that typifies a day in lockdown. The artist’s face is deftly suggested yet somehow barely there, rendered in an inexplicable blur of colours. Her features are present but the tones are smeared, the eyes beginning to vanish – perhaps tired from looking or being looked at. It could be any day of the week, any era, any time of day or night. The artist’s right arm appears to extend just beyond our sight, maybe grasping hold of the phone, the mirror, or the selfie stick that has triggered the image. As the coloured edges of the portrait fade away, the woman in the centre seems to sink from us. Is she sick of the sight of herself? In defiance of being read, her expression gives very little away. Such blankness is rarely as colourful as this. 

Website

Kareem-Anthony Ferreira and Tenderness

Kareem-Anthony Ferreira is a Canadian artist of Trinidadian heritage. Last month I explored how Nigerian-Irish artist Grace Enemaku creates visions of Black Girl Magic for other Black women and girls, but Ferreira’s scenes actively anticipate their non-Trinidadian viewers, offering a subtle visual dialogue between his two cultures of Canada and the (often simplified) “Caribbean”. Much of the coding at play is located in the fabric patterns used by the artist, more often commercial than authentic, and “meant to be easily identifiable, cliché, and at times, sarcastic,” he explains. The works are informed in part by the artist’s ability to riff off expectations of Trinidadian culture; what he calls the “social imaginaries” or “island imaginaries” that we hold about Caribbean peoples. Ferreira nuances those visions with his drawn-from-life scenarios, and though insiders and outsiders are not intended to read his portraits the same way, the “emotional sincerity” that powers his loving depictions is available to anyone who looks.

Rich and vivid in colour and texture, Ferreira’s large-as-life portraits depict diverse Black subjects – individuals, groups and families – engaged in the pleasurable business of being together, or just simply being. His sitters are often members of his family and extended community and the scenes they create together are relaxed, candid, and rich with the drama of the everyday. Ferreira writes, “In my work I am tracing patterns of personal, familial and social identity within the genre of black portraiture.” The conversational titles given to the works further this sense; they have the air of a friendly host walking a visitor through the family photo album. There’s “Roger, the boys and Granny finally enjoying some nice weather…”. Here’s “Aunty and Ms relaxing and reading…” Domesticity, recreation, pleasure, familial occasion and bonding are some of Ferreira’s plot points, but his themes go beyond this, looking deeper into the ways that the Black family is represented, specifically of Caribbean origin, and what might be projected onto his diaspora.

In the absence of any in-person viewing, gallery shots from the artist’s website can help us to appreciate the full scale, patterns and textures of his compositions. The aspect ratio of his works and the frequent presence of one or more subjects looking back at the viewer give away the fact that these scenes originate in photography. Ferreira describes how he creates them by “combining several vernacular photographs into a compositional arrangement.” Upon first sight they often read as straightforward paintings, but are in fact rich medleys of acrylic, graphite, wax crayon, cloth collage and paper collage applied to canvas. Some of his more complex works are assemblages of multiple canvases additionally adorned with bits of wood, strips of fabric and dried plants bound together, the origins of which may also speak to a Trinidadian viewer in a particular way. Amongst the diverse figures themselves there is almost always a sense of ease, of shared living, and an unobtrusive artist’s eye; what I have consistently read as tenderness, and what the artist himself, touchingly, calls “reverence”.

Website

Yang Xu and Fantasy

Born in 90s China and working in 21st-century London, Yang Xu is a young artist whose drawings, paintings, costume, film and photography have incongruously revived rococo as the preferred style for our contemporary age. The supremely ornate school of art and design that flourished in 18th-century Europe, hot on the heels of baroque, is, according to Yang Xu, a “maligned art form […] underpinned by idealisations, hopes and dreams we should have access to.” Viewers might read the lavish interiors and ornately dressed figures as mere aesthetic throwbacks. But, taken as a full body of work – with Yang Xu’s beloved unicorns and her mysterious women without faces – the paintings suggest this is a place of fairy tale and imagination rather than resuscitated history. Either way, the opulence is unmistakably plush and courtly, enhanced by Yang Xu’s use of materials, which include velvet, carpet, fringe and silver plating, as well as traditional oils on linen.  

Her portrait works are fantastical and compelling, yet I have been hesitant to even describe them as portraits at all since they omit the one thing we might agree is central to the form – a face. Her sitters are all women (“I aim to empower women by painting them and only them alone so as to lend some restorative privacy,” she states), often arranged with their backs to us on chaises longues, at windows or at dressing tables. Wherever there is a mirror present, however, we see in the reflection that they possess only a pale blur where a face ought to be. Regard the work Mirror Mirror 22032019 (2019) closely and you may surmise from the portrait on the wall that the sitter’s absent face is not a ghostly aberration; this might well be a world full of faceless women. The occasional inclusion of a discreet memento mori in the shape of a skull or the vaguely occult presence of a black cat may hint at something supernatural, but it’s impossible to summon fear amid the gaiety and kitsch of these powder pink settings.

So, who are these anonymous women made of reflections and mirrors? Yang Xu writes: 

The emptiness in the mirror … brings loneliness, tension and a sense of danger. The space is private, explores what women can do… Her face is blurred, or covered by a mask. She could be anyone, or anyone could be her. This is my alter-ego and portrays a ‘self’ as a skin for anyone to put on. 

These are portraits of fantasy, role-play and projection. In a series of short film works, Yang Xu expresses these vibrant alter-egos, dressing as if she has stepped out from one of her own painted scenes, all towering Marie Antoinette wigs and elaborate pastel-coloured gowns. She carries her paintings around with her in public places, like parks. She makes a delightful scene, a show of herself. She talks about the power of paint to “realise fantasies from a plain canvas.” This is a portrait come to life. A skin for anyone to put on. 

Website

In our hyper-photographed age we might think we’ve seen enough of each other, but portraiture suggests otherwise. In fact, it’s satisfying to think that there is not much that portraiture cannot do or say, nestled as it is at the hectic junction of personality and politics. It bursts not only in content but in form. Over this two-part essay, we have seen the contemporary portrait offer the posed body, the mirrored self or the blank self, the natural assembly of warm bodies, the adorned or the raw, both joy and injustice, unseen familial tableaux, and new kinds of people. In the previous instalment, I quoted John Berger’s description of the 17th-century artist Frans Hals: “The first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism.” For as long as “new characters” emerge we will want artists to help us see them.

Read ‘Contemporary Portraits: Part One’, here.