Chris Ofili's Opulent Paintings of Sin and Seduction
Chris Ofili's latest work delves into sin, offering up a profusion of seductive painted ambiguities.
Chris Ofili, The Fall From Grace (2019–2023). Oil and charcoal on linen. 310 x 200 cm. Exhibition view: The Seven Deadly Sins, Victoria Miro, London (2 June–29 July 2023). © Chris Ofili. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.
The Trinidad-based British artist returns to Victoria Miro's London gallery with The Seven Deadly Sins (2 June–29 July 2023), an exhibition of seven monumental paintings in oil and charcoal on linen, accompanied by a separate showing of ten small etchings by the artist.
Forming the series Pink Daydreams of a Faun (2021), the etchings are printed on paper using the Japanese Suminagashi marbling technique. Inspired by the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's 1876 symbolist epic, L'Après-midi d'un faune (The Afternoon of a Faun), they are presented in the reception area, providing a suitable introduction to the paintings that follow.
Ofili's paintings are spread across Victoria Miro's two main spaces and reference the Bible's deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Completed in Barbados and Trinidad between 2017 and 2023, Ofili's new works are intended to encompass a spectrum of excessive and transgressive behaviours, meditating on the motivations for sin.1
Reflecting on these works, writer Hilton Als identified: '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.'2
Each painting is intricately elaborate, populated by swathes of colour and pattern, at once abstract and figurative. Lush foliage and verdant floral patterns create phantasmagorical spaces in which otherworldly figures are just discernible.
Overlaid with veils of frothy, floating molecules, thin lines, and swirling fronds, the paintings are impossible to grasp definitively. They contain constant motion—explosions and ripples that force the viewer to look and then look again.
In The Swing (2020–2023), one of four paintings presented on the ground floor, figures disappear almost completely into the painted ground. Partly inspired by Mallarmé's poem, in which the central character reflects on his visions of a pair of nymphs, Ofili's interpretation shows a just-discernible woman swinging above a reclining satyr or devil-like figure sprouting colourful horns and a tail with a flame-like tip.
This satyr figure recurs throughout the exhibition, usually composed of blackish-brown spots overlaid by an array of colourful floating cells that resemble sequins. Sometimes they are an obvious protagonist, while at other times, their presence is only hinted at by the suggestion of a tail or spike of a horn.
In The Great Beauty (2020–2023), also on the ground floor, the bulbous satyr form reclines across the bottom of the composition, with a hand-like appendage extending over a pale ring of dancing figures. The hand appears to grasp the tendrils of a green plant which is echoed across the composition. Two pairs of legs dangling from the top of the composition are accompanied by two white egrets.
Nearby, in The Fountain (2017–2023), flora bursts upwards from a bowl held up by three intertwined figures. One figure at the bottom left of the canvas blows from their mouth a plume of forms that resemble floating foliage or miniature bodies. The more you look, the more these forms transform into something other than what you first see.
Across these paintings, Ofili suggests ecstatic or sensual moments where human and non-human, flower and foliage, stars and cosmos, landscape and seascape are entwined. He appears to capture the essence of the moment when pleasure takes hold and overflows without fear of judgement or consequence.
The three paintings upstairs continue similarly, although The Fall from Grace (2019–2023) depicts the ecstatic moment most obviously. With extraordinary sophistication, Ofili uses lines and spotting to depict an ecclesiastical explosion of light rays and raindrops with specks of light that drift across the canvas. Here, a fantastical central figure appears to fall and is framed by an audience of small profiles that, on the left of the canvas, blow flowers like a trumpet out of their lips.
Ofili has often used materials to both seduce and repel, contrasting decorative elements with sociopolitical topics—evident in his Turner Prize-winning painting No Woman, No Cry (1998), rendered in oil, acrylic, graphite, resin, paper, glitter, pins, and, infamously, elephant dung. Depicting a crying likeness of Doreen Lawrence, the painting references her teenage son Stephen, who was murdered in a racist attack in 1993.
Ofili's recent paintings use only oil and charcoal, but they are nonetheless rich in decoration and drenched in excess. While devoid of discernible, real-life figures, they manage to convey some of the complexities of humanity where the line between pleasure and sin is often murky and fraught.—[O]
