Kehinde Wiley
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
- Keri Oldham -
Kehinde Wiley, The Chancellor Seguier on Horseback, 2005; oil on canvas;
108 x 144 inches; collection of Jean Pigozzi, Geneva
Prince Tommaso Francesco of Savoy–Carignano, 2006; oil on canvas;
122 x 122 inches; collection Xavier and Alexandria van Campenhout
Ornate and large in scale, Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are flamboyant cultural remixes that insert black men into kingly portraiture reminiscent of the Rococo and Romantic periods. Clad in urban regalia: jeans, tennis shoes and baseball caps, young black men take center stage in narrative scenes common in Western art—in the trope of portraiture in particular—a history from which such men are historically excluded.
Each painting is cleverly placed into separate niches to allow for isolated contemplation in the modestly scaled FOCUS gallery at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. In Colonel Platoff on His Charger, a young man in a red, fur-lined jacket and cargo pants steadies his wide-eyed horse in front of a multicolored sky in an allusion to the romantic portraiture of James Ward, specifically Napoleon on Horseback. Swirls of delicate silver leaves billow around the stately, handsome and majestic young rider. In The Chancellor Seguier on Horseback, young men walk in a regal procession surrounding a central figure seated on a horse draped in gold. The Chancellor is dressed in a crisp football jersey while the other men are clad in jeans and T-shirts, holding black parasols also fringed in gold.
In this scene, the conspicuous similarity between Rococo ornamentation and the hip-hop industry’s flare for color, ornamentation, theatrics and excess is evident, which makes this series much more than an indictment of historical exclusion. Rather, it is a rich and multilayered appropriation of power, where traditional symbols of control and exclusion are drained of pretension and reinvented to express the creative vitality and heroism of urban black men. Historical entitlement has been upturned, and these young riders lay claim to history and leadership in both politics and the humanities. Wiley’s portraits are not without a dash of irony and humor: his young riders point toward a distant pink twilight in dramatic moments of faux historical romance. Yet Wylie seems to delight in this juxtaposition, the melding of “highbrow” portraiture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western elite with pop-culture imagery. Beauty, decadence, politics and authority merge as raw material for expression and reinvention.
Wylie understands the intimate link between power and fabrication, reminding us that the way we visually register wealth and privilege is a mere charade. As a contemporary audience, it is easy for us to identify the constructed nature of a portrait in which a young black hero dressed in modern clothes is presented in an anachronistic, Romantic setting. Yet, how skilled are we in identifying related and equally constructed symbols in present-day imagery, especially images generated by the mass media? Ultimately, what we are reminded of in Wiley’s work is that portraiture creates a narrative: the story of who our heroes were—or are. Wiley’s portraits herald a shift, celebrating masculinity and black men as creative innovators of our time.
Keri Oldham is an artist and writer based in Dallas. She is Assistant Director of And/Or Gallery.