![]() Ornamentation and visual excess have always featured in Ofili’s art. Ofili, like Polke, is interested in the altered states paintings might conjure. I am reminded of Sigmar Polke, not just because of Polke’s use of dots, or that the German painter also painted the devil. One thing always leading to another, in novel ways. Now 54, he makes art that is always recognisable, but he hasn’t pinned himself down. Photograph: Jack Hems/Chris Ofili, courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Ornamentation and excess … The Fountain by Chris Ofili. Franz Marc is in there (Ofili has long been fascinated by Marc and Kandinsky’s Der Blaue Reiter), and William Blake too, with his swooning spirits and angels, as well as his weird anatomies. There are palmettos and carnal flowers and leaf-forms, writhing stems and snaking tendrils that make me think of the Viennese secessionists and of Hilma af Klint – if only the visionary theosophist and abstractionist had left Sweden, gone to the Caribbean and discovered sex. Souls swirl in a vortex as Pan plays a pipe. ![]() ![]() White egrets fly across one, passing between pairs of elegant legs. They’re left incomplete, or glimpsed as voluptuous bulges and extrusions, camouflaged by constant shifts in touch and application. Limbs appear and disappear, fold and spread. The Seven Deadly Sins are paintings in constant transition: between surface and depth, figure and foliage, light and dark between mythology and religion, the sacred and profane.īegun in 2017, and worked on in Barbados and Trinidad where Ofili lives, the paintings were all completed this year. Although rich and dense, most of these works are thinly, almost transparently painted, till suddenly, in one that recalls Fragonard’s rococo The Swing, there’s a swerve to thickly applied, clotted opacity. Every mark, every dot or sinuous line in Ofili’s painting is deliberate, the result of a conscious touch or series of touches. Bridget Riley does this, too, in a very different way. Ofili captures your sight and makes you aware of the act of your own seeing. Looking at these new paintings by Ofili, your eye slides and drifts, trying to catch hold, but it keeps on slipping and gets pulled under, caught by currents and undertows and dragged around. Shades of Fragonard … The Swing by Chris Ofili.
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