Kehind Wiley's search for the miraculous.

When I last visited a Kehinde Wiley exhibition in London, in February 2018, it was held at Stephen Friedman Gallery in Mayfair and I was one of a handful of people there. Jump forward just over four years ago and he's showing, for free, at The National Gallery's prestigious Sunley Room and the place was packed.

It is packed with a much younger, and far more racially diverse, crowd than you usually see at the National Gallery or, sadly, most major London art shows. Which is good. Because London is a huge, diverse, city and the people who attend London art exhibitions should reflect that diversity. For the first time, for this art looker at least, since Tate Modern's 2017 show Soul of a Nation:Art in the Age of Black Power that box was ticked.

Prelude (Babacar Mane) (2021)

 

I doubt many left disappointed. Wiley's paintings are big, colourful, and impressive and they will have, for many in the exhibition, shown visitors people who look at least a bit like them in a major art institution in Britain for possibly the first time. Have a walk around the rest of the gallerys at the National. I'd wager there are more horses than people of colour.

 

Back in 2017, I'd complained that Wiley's video work wasn't as good as his paintings. That wasn't a problem as that show was, primarily, about the paintings. But Kehinde Wiley:A Prelude, for that was the name of this show, was more about the video than the paintings. The paintings, if anything, were intended as a backdrop to a roughly half hour long video that was displayed on six screens (impossible to watch them all at once) to a packed, and rapt, room full of people.

In Search of the Miraculous (Jasmine Gracout and Robenson St. Firmin (2021)

It was good (I feel as I get to know more about Wiley's work I'm beginning to understand what he's getting at with the video work) and I'll mention it again later but, for me, it was the paintings themselves that most impressed, still. 

Wiley, as before, continues to challenge and appropriate conventions of Western landscape and seascape painting and, by repopulating these paintings with black faces, to ask questions about race and identity. Here, he's focusing on those who "exist on the periphery of nations, who shuttle back and forth between physical, gendered and racial realities" and to do this he's using wry and subversive techniques to reimagine works like Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

Ship of Fools II (2021)

Prelude (Ibrahima Ndiaye and El Hadji Malick Gueye) (2021)

Except those that make up of Wiley's images aren't the rich and powerful but the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. Wiley finds his models in Haiti, in Senegal's capital city Dakar, and here in Soho. Shamefully it took me a while to realise that these represent, more or less, the three corners of the triangle of the slave trade.

While Wiley may appear a modern painter he is firmly attuned to history and this comes through in his paintings. Not just political or art history, which - and I suspect Wiley would agree with me - is tightly intertwined anyway. The landscapes and romanticism of his backgrounds could come from paintings by the likes of Claude or Turner but the outfits those that populate his paintings most definitely, and defiantly, could not.

I couldn't help thinking that this was probably the first time I'd seen a painting of a man wearing a t-shirt with a Nike swoosh on it! Another visitor, looking at that same painting - Ship of Fools II, wondered aloud why those in the boat had taken a tree with them. Not least when two others are flailing in the water.

In Search of the Miraculous (Zakary Antoine and Jasmine Gracout) (2021)

It's a fair question and shows that people were enjoying the work, I saw others taking selfies in front of the paintings, while, at the same time, pondering their meanings. There were just five paintings in total but each of them was wonderful.

The video, Prelude, too was pretty visually spellbinding. Not that my photos do it justice - the room was simply too packed to do better without being very selfish. It features a cast of black Londoners who accompanied Wiley on a trip to the fjords and snowy landscapes of Norway and includes excerpts of poems from the likes of William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson set to a score by composer Niles Luther.

The juxtaposition of black skin against white backgrounds was, clearly, fully intended and a night scene of fire was equally powerful but I have to admit I still didn't quite get what the message was supposed to be. Perhaps it was meant to make me think, perhaps the art wasn't for me - a white middle aged man, or perhaps I have more work to do to understand Wiley, his art, and his message. Either way, that's fine. He's a good enough artist so I'm willing to put a bit more work in for him. In that, despite being my second blog about Kehinde Wiley, this exhibition really did serve as something of a prelude.