Amid this sober coloration splashes of yellow and pink abound, and vivid blues and emerald greens, all tempered by the many snowdrop gaps of unpainted canvas, like floral accents in an English garden. The colors are generally muted: greens and grays and blacks and an extraordinary variety of browns. Sometimes the men hold animals like familiars-an owl, a songbird, a cat. The artist dislikes attaching her figures to a particular historical moment, and there’s no way around the historicity of shoes.
One young man puts his hands on his knees and laughs, with his legs apart and his feet turned out he is dressed simply, like the rest, in blocks of swiftly laid paint, creating here a black vest, there some white trousers. In the œuvre of the British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, there are quite a few dancers, lithe in their leotards, but all of her people look as though they might well belong to that profession. If they are with others, the company is never mixed, as if too much heat might be generated by introducing that half-naked man over there to this sharp-eyed dancing girl. They sit, stretch, lounge, stand, and are often lost in contemplation, their eyes averted.
It’s impossible to avoid noticing that they are all-every man and each woman-physically beautiful. Most are on herringbone linen one is on canvas. The show has a melancholy, literary title, “Under-Song For A Cipher,” and consists of seventeen paintings hung low, depicting a set of striking individuals, all slightly larger than human scale, though not imposingly so. But on a recent day the room was filled with oils. You might expect towering video screens in here, or something bulky and three-dimensional, requiring circling-entering, even. The exhibition space on the fourth floor of the New Museum, in New York, is a long room with a high ceiling.
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