Tate Britain, London
The artist has boldly reclaimed figurative oil painting and filled the gallery with the kind of contemporary art it normally shuns
Looking at Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painting No Such Luxury, I suddenly saw how much she has in common with the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The work depicts a woman sitting at a table with a cup and saucer in front of her, gazing straight out. That seems simple but the longer you look, the stranger it becomes. Magritte portrayed himself in the same pose in his painting The Magician – except with four arms. Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas may seem, by comparison, a slice of real life. But it’s weirdly out of scale, a bit larger than life. The woman is a monument, her gaze mystical and far-seeing – a Buddha of suburbia.
Yet Yiadom-Boakye has a far deeper affinity with Magritte. She makes us believe in someone who does not exist. Everything about her pictures of people says “portrait”. But these are not portraits. They’re fictional creations, imagined characters. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” Magritte wrote beneath a painting of a pipe. Yiadom-Boakye’s exhibition could have been simply called “This is not a portrait.”
