"Don't be a sinner, be a winner" - Phil Howard
The Swing (2020-2023)
In the early noughties, for a well over a decade, a youngish man by the name of Phil Howard would stand, sometimes with a megaphone, in Oxford Circus at lunchtime imploring the crowds streaming into the tube station, H&M, and Niketown to "forget about vanity and check out Christianity" and, most famously of all, imploring them "don't be a sinner, be a winner".
It's not recorded how many people he converted (I'd estimate the number to be small, possibly non-existent). The artist Chris Ofili takes a more nuanced approach to pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth in his new show, titled The Seven Deadly Sins, hosted by Victoria Miro in their expansive Wharf Road gallery.
The Great Beauty (2020-2023)
To be honest, if the show wasn't called The Seven Deadly Sins you wouldn't know it was about sin at all. You'd probably just think that they're rather beautiful oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of artists like Pierre Bonnard or Maurice de Vlaminck. They're riots of colour - but then everything Ofili does is a riot of colour. Even when he used to use elephant turds in his work. Come to think of it, I miss the elephant turds.
The titles don't even really give clues to the sinful subject matter. I'd assumed The Swing to be named in tribute to Jean-Honore Fragonard's iconic Rococo painting, I'd guessed The Great Beauty got its name from Paolo Sorrentino's wonderful 2013 film, and The Harvesters sounds like something Van Gogh may have called one of his paintings. You know, like The Potato Eaters.
The Fountain (2017-2023)
The Crowning (2021-2023)
The Fall From Grace does have biblical overtones but even then it sounds like the sort of title William Blake may have used and Blake very much created his own mythology. Thinking about it there's something of the William Blake in these paintings. Ofili has imagined, defined, and designed an alternative world, one that looks a bit like ours but one that also looks nothing like ours.
He's imagined a heaven, or perhaps a place of purgatory. An Eden of wild birds worthy of John James Audobon, strange plants and flowers that sometimes defy gravity, crepuscular rays falling from above, radiant stars, liminal beings dancing at the edge of time and space, and floating angelic beings. You could sit and look at these paintings for a long time and continually see different things in them.
The Fall From Grace (2019-2023)
The Pink Waterfall (2019-2023)
Ofili himself certainly spent time with them. The entire project took him six years and he invited writers like Marlon James and artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye to write about the feelings the works invoked in them. James took an interesting approach:- "sometimes I think sin is merely a good thing taken too far" before reassessing the concept of one particular sin through a racial lens:- "sloth is relaxation if black people relaxed like white people".
Yiadom-Boakye was a little more traditionalist in her approach, "sin can fill your mouth and belly and loins but not your heart", but more interesting still was Attilah Springer's idea that "sin is something that powerful people do for which powerless people have to pay the price" and Hilton Als:- "in real life our sins are often as unclear as our nicer motivations; often they're jumbled together, a ball of spores that shoot off in all directions whenever another human, or life event, enters our consciousness and heart".
You can, like James, Yiadom-Boakye, Spinger, and Als consider the nature of sin when you take in Ofili's free show or you can, as I did, simply enjoy his very beautiful paintings. Best of all you could do both. Don't be too proud about it though, don't buy them and hoard them, don't get angry about it, don't feel jealous of Ofili's talent, don't have rude thoughts about the people in the paintings, don't eat too much afterwards, and don't, whatever you do, be lazy. Non-existent God wouldn't like it.
The Harvesters (2019-2023)
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