A Hot Conceptualist Finds the Secret of Skin

Is Kehinde Wiley a Conceptual subversive who happens to paint or yet another producer of pictorial fluff that makes him our latest Bouguereau? Do his big, flashy pictures of young African-American men recast as the kings, dandies, prophets and saints of European portraiture subvert the timeworn ruses of Western art and its hierarchies of race, class and sex? Or are they just a passing art-market fancy, with enough teasing irreverence, dollops of political correctness and decorative punch to look good for a while above the couches of pseudoliberal pseudocollectors?The answers to all these questions may be, Try again. “Kehinde Wiley, the World Stage: Africa, Lagos-Dakar,” a show of 10 of his most recent paintings at the Studio Museum in Harlem, proposes another possibility: Mr. Wiley is a young artist whose intellectual ambition and Photo Realist chops have allowed his career to get ahead of his art.His stats include 15 solo shows in galleries and museums around the world since 2003, studios in New York and China and assistants who help him turn out scores of paintings that sell briskly. And yet at 31 Mr. Wiley is only now beginning to make paintings that don’t feel mostly like campy, gaudy shams. This show — which would be more appropriate in a commercial gallery than in a museum, by the way — could mark the end of his first 15 minutes of fame and the beginning of his second, with an option to renew.Until now the Conceptual rationale behind Mr. Wiley’s paintings has tended to overpower their visual presence, which helps reduce them to illustrations. Like Norman Rockwell’s paintings they look better in reproduction than in reality.His portraits initially depicted African-American men against rich textile or wallpaper backgrounds whose patterns he has likened to abstractions of sperm. Some of the subjects were famous (rap and sports stars), others not.Their silken running suits, carefully creased jeans and bling reflected the sartorial codes of hip-hop, but their poses and props (thrones, scepters, rearing horses, religious attributes) were lifted from the portraits of Velázquez, David and Gainsborough or Renaissance images of saints. The substitution of black for white faces and low for high culture created all kinds of mind-bending twists and turns, especially since Mr. Wiley, who is gay, often brought out the homoeroticism implicit in much European portraiture and used it to undercut the machismo bluster of his subjects.But the paintings’ slick surfaces usually felt dead and mechanical, despite having been painstakingly handmade; their compositions were often fussy and unstable, and the men’s posturing, however undercut, could seem defensive, if not misogynistic. Mr. Wiley’s work also seemed overly indebted to artists and photographers working with issues like identity and celebrity, including Andy Warhol, Barkley L. Hendricks, John Ahearn and Rigoberto Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, Annie Leibowitz, Catherine Opie, Kerry James Marshall, Yinka Shonibare, Malick Sidibe, Yasumasa Morimura and Seydou Keïta.A lot of these problems are receding in the Studio Museum show because Mr. Wiley is doing what all painters have to do: developing a surface of his own. To do so he is starting where most figurative painters have started, at least since the invention of oil paint: with the rendering of human skin. He is beginning to paint skin in ways you can’t stop looking at. And other things are falling into place too. The compositions are consistently calmer, and the spatial play between the figures and their backgrounds is more tightly controlled. SOURCE:NYT.COM