Executed in 2018, Nearer from Kith, Further than Kind is an exquisite double portrait embodying Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly oeuvre. Each occupying their own half of the diptych, the two figures fill the picture plane, relaxed and at ease as they smoke in a world of gentle idleness. Tranquil and unperturbed, the two figures emanate a subtle mixture of vulnerability and strength, dignity and grace. In shades of grey and white, the uncluttered interior space is full of subtle modulations in tone, colour and feeling. Both dressed in simple white T-shirts, the eye is drawn to the sophistication and nuances that radiate from each gesture and glance, the way their hands hold the cigarettes and their shallowed cheeks breathing in the smoke. Yiadom-Boakye captures a provisional state, the evanescence of a mood, hinting at the universal human experiences.

Born in London in 1977 to Ghanaian parents, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye grew up in South London where she had originally planned to pursue a career as an optician. However, following a foundation course at Central St Martin’s, Yiadom-Boakye decided to study painting at Falmouth School of Art, then at the Royal Academy Schools where she graduated in 2003. Soon after graduation, her figurative paintings came to public attention when it was selected for John Moores exhibition in Liverpool and Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries in 2004. In recent years, the artist has seen widespread institutional success: in 2019 she received the Carnegie Prize and represented Ghana at the 58^th Venice Biennale, and in 2020 she was the subject of a major travelling retrospective, Fly in League with the Night, which after touring Moderna Museet in Stockholm Sweden, K20 in Dusseldorf, Germany and Mudam Luxembourg – Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg, will return to Tate Britain, London this September.

Whereas Yiadom-Boakye’s early portraits are coarsely painted with a cartoonish humour, the later works are rigorous exercises in the monochrome, exploring chiaroscuro that recall Rembrandt van Rijn, or the black paintings of Francisco de Goya, endowing the portraits with a greater sense of solemnity. This shift in style is reflective of a transition in Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly preoccupation; the early foregrounding of narrative makes way in her later works for more formal concerns of paint as a medium. Yiadom-Boakye had said of this transition: “Over time I realised I needed to think less about the subject and more about the painting. So I began to think seriously about colour, light and composition.” (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye quoted in: Antwaun Sargent, “Lynette Yiadom-Boaye’s fictive Figures,” Interview, 13 May 2017, online). Yiadom-Boakye’s painterly process is akin to that of ancient fresco techniques. Paint is applied fast, wet on wet, and thinly, so that the herringbone texture of the linen she began using in recent years remains clearly visible. Her use of linen, which is coarser than canvas, allows different mark-making: As the fabric’s textured surface reacts to the pigment, a greater sense of improvisation is facilitated within the painting process. The two canvases of the present diptych are painted on different linen surfaces, with a clear herringbone texture on the right canvas and a coarse pattern on the left.

Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings are a celebration as well as an interrogation of the genre of portraiture. Since the Renaissance, the genre has been used to convey class and rank, bestowing the sitter with a sense of importance, wealth and beauty through the inclusion of symbolic objects. The stripped-back paintings of Yiadom-Boakye eschew grandeur for a sense of modesty, resisting any definition of social class. Rather they share what Erwin Panofsky described as the central desire of Renaissance artists: “to being whatever the sitter has in common with the rest of humanity.” (Erwin Panofsky quoted in: Sherer West, Portraiture, Oxford, 2004, p. 4). However, unlike Renaissance portraits, Yiadom-Boakye’s sitters are imagined people. Referencing her own scrapbooks of magazine and newspaper cut-outs, family snapshots and details of old master paintings, Yiadom-Boakye finds a starting point from which her imagination fills in the rest. Created through a complex psychological layering of personalities, the fictional subjects emanate an arresting sense of self-possession. In the age-old canon of Western painting where black subjects have been relegated to marginalised and subservient roles, Yiadom-Boakye rejects the stereotype. The artist said of her fictional sitters: “If they are pathetic, they don’t survive – if I feel sorry for someone, I get rid of them. I don’t like to paint victims.” (Lynette Yiadom-Boakye quoted in: Exh. Cat., London, Tate (and travelling), Lynette Yiadom-Baokye: Flying In League With The Night, November 2020 – September 2022, p. 14). Indeed, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects are empowered, their gaze powerful and introspective, resisting the stereotypical ideas of black identity as one of hyper-masculinity, or the cliched presentation of black people as angry and wild. Confident, reflective, and empowered, Yiadom-Boakye’s subjects reimagine the representation of the black body.

Yiadom-Boakye’s art historical sources draw on nineteenth-century painters such as Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, John Singer Sargent and Walter Sickert. Colour, composition, gesture, glance or pose from historical European painters are transposed and reimagined. The subtle modulations of greys and whites in the shirt folds of the present work echo the tablecloths of Cezanne, while the left smoker’s direct gaze at the viewer over his shoulder seems to be a compositional quotation of the smoking man in Sickert’s Ennui. Yiadom-Boakye takes the traditionally white space of the leisurely domestic scene and occupies it with her black subjects, in a gentle yet radical statement. An artist to whose work Yiadom-Boakye often returns, Sickert’s thin washes of paint and shallow space resonates in the surface of the present work. Refashioning the historical conventions of portraiture, Nearer than Kith, Further from Kind is an exemplary work demonstrating Yiadom-Boakye’s masterful handling of paint.