Into the Unknown
By Calvin Tomkins
Photograph by Malick Sidibé
Chris Ofili paints in a dilapidated white cottage on Lady Chancellor Road, about ten minutes from downtown Port of Spain, in Trinidad. It has three rooms, each large enough to accommodate one or two of the strange, dreamlike paintings he is working on. Aside from taking out the kitchen, Ofili has done nothing to the cottage. Rickety windows on one side are propped open with sticks. No air-conditioner, no screens, no studio assistant. The house clings to a steep hillside, the floor slants downhill, and the floorboards sag and groan. Most of the recent paintings in Ofili’s first major New York retrospective, which opens at the New Museum on October 29th, were done in these rooms.
“I think I just resolved something about this one,” he said, somewhat conspiratorially. It was a morning in June, and we were looking at a dark nine-foot-tall vertical painting called “Lime Bar,” which he had been working on since April. A black man in a frilled white semi-transparent shirt stands behind a bar squeezing limes, and in the foreground a couple in shadow, a man and a woman, sit close together drinking. “When I leave the studio at night, I take a photo of the picture I’m working on,” Ofili continued. “This morning when I woke up, I looked at the photo and thought, I’ll change his shirt.” The barman’s shirt had originally been white, but Ofili had painted it black, to make the figure recede. “It looked ghastly,” he said. “So this morning I decided to make the shirt white again, but the black was still wet, and the paint wasn’t going on the way I wanted. I started to blot it with this”—he picked up an old green T-shirt to demonstrate—“and it left this amazing texture. I got lucky. Until that moment it was all panic and despair, because I thought I was going to lose it.”
That an artist of Chris Ofili’s stature could feel panic and despair over an unfinished painting somehow strains belief. He projects the inner confidence that his physical presence leads you to expect—at forty-five, he is well over six feet tall and powerfully built, and he dresses with casual elegance. Early success in London gave him the freedom to chart his own course in painting, at a time when painting was being dismissed as obsolete. He won the Turner Prize in 1998, when he was thirty, the first black artist to do so. Notoriety arrived a year later, in New York. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s moral and political sensitivities were so outraged by Ofili’s use of elephant dung in his painting of the Virgin Mary that he tried to cut off all municipal funding from the Brooklyn Museum, where it was part of a group exhibition from the Saatchi Collection. Ofili has been reluctant to exhibit his work in New York since then, but he has gone right on producing startlingly original paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures. Writing about the later paintings in Ofili’s 2010 retrospective at Tate Modern, Adrian Searle, a British critic who has followed his career with particular acumen, found them “uncompromisingly difficult.” “This is dangerous territory,” Searle went on to say. “Rather than living up to his reputation, he is now more concerned to push his art forward.”