SEE this.

Five shoeless women are dancing in a small circle. They wear white sleeveless dresses that stick to their glowing brown skins. Their heads are tilted one way or the other, their generous, spongy hair each a black halo. Their hands are carefully thrown about. One woman’s hands are in the air above her head, crossed at the wrists, like Christ’s. Another’s are thrown behind her, like childhood wishes. Their legs are in mid-motion. All raise one leg each, toes kissing the ground or the floor. One woman’s toes are levelled with the knee of her other leg, the one planted on the ground or the floor. I could swear the women’s eyes are closed. They are in a different realm from ours. Alive in a quiet way. They are keyed into their inner, interior selves. Each is one with herself. The mood, too, is hushed. The music is still. The atmosphere is a choreography of silence.

Does a scene of dance get more evocative than this? Women more angelic? White dresses more radiant? A chorus of legs more rhythmic? A flurry of hands more mesmerising? You should set these questions before Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who painted The Hours Behind You, based on a moment from Melinda Ring’s 2010 dance X (2011). You should ask, too, what link, if any, exists between this painting and its title.

But hold on first.

These women you see are imaginary. They have no real-life referents. They are created out of the abundance of the painter’s mind. She painted them from her head. They also are not specifically or definitively marked. Shoeless—yet their simple dresses do not outrightly belong to a specific time, place, taste, trend, etc., but are simply blocks of colours covering the wearers’ naked forms. The women are also outdoors. Or not. You can’t really tell. And no furniture or equipment in sight. If there were, you could peg such things to a specific time. This is how Yiadom-Boakye, British-Ghanaian, born 1977, paints. 

Thus.

There are more questions to tackle than the enchantment of a painting or the link between such a work and its title. Who are these humans peopling Lynette’s canvases? Where have they come from? What instigated them? Why them?

But Yiadom-Boakye also writes. She’s a writer. She writes stories and prose-poems she publishes in her exhibition catalogues. These stories are fabulistic. They court no apparent meaning. They are vague. Take Plans Of The Night (Part II). It is night. The fox is hungry and desperate. Defiantly, he crosses a busy London main road. “Fear diminished and dignity crumbling,” he walks through a quiet residence, caring not at all if anyone sees him, “the black weight of the night bending his back in two.”

He stops at the back garden of No. 25. “The kitchen is illuminated. He peers in and watches closely. It is just past 8 p.m.” His eyes are on the “dish of cat food on the floor.” Just then, a woman comes in, “carrying cava and two flutes.” She’s wearing only a coat and lingerie. A man comes in after her, the two laughing and talking. Soon they’re at it, the woman on the kitchen top, legs around the man’s big waist, the man struggling with his trouser zip.

Stoic, the fox leaps through the window. The couple has by now changed position. The woman is bent over, her hands spread across the stove, the man behind her, “still hard at work.” But just then the fox notices a second man in the kitchen, who, like the fox, has come in quietly, the fox through the window flap, the man a side door. Their eyes meet. They smile at each other. Then each moves on to fulfil his desire. And so as the fox eats the cat food the man repeatedly hits his wife’s guest on the head with “a blunt object.” During this the cava has split on the floor as well as a quantity of blood. The fox takes a lick at both to soften the rather salty cat food. Then he vanishes into the night, leaving his hosts to theirs.

Surely more questions. But perhaps the most necessary is this: What connects her painting to her writing? What link is there between these two practices of hers?

LYNETTE Yaidom-Boakye paints what she cannot write and writes what she cannot paint. This is now a famous quote of the artist-writer. But it also underscores the link between her visual work and her literary practice. This is tricky. The link, if any, is like most things about her work: implied, implicit, indirect. Or almost non-existent. 

Take, first of all, the titles. They are gnomic, poetic, mysterious. A 2017 painting of a dancer caught in motion, black ball in hands swung to her right, as if to make a throw, is titled, Carve a Corpse for Care. How come? Another of a man in an orange turtleneck and black trousers sitting on (what looks like) a white chair, a black cat on his shoulder, is titled, In Lieu of a Keen Virtue (2017). And that of two women, one reclining on a purple bed (?) propped up on one elbow, the other standing on the black-and-white squared floor, a hand to her head, is titled, To Improvise a Mountain (2018).

(Actually, the titles, as well as the paintings, have not always been poetic and elusive. They used to be literal and narrative. She once titled a painting The Devil Made Me Do It. In it, four girls stand upright, their headphones plugged into the floor. Clearly, they are taking instructions from the Devil.)

For one thing, Yaidom-Boakye derives the titles from removed or arbitrary sources. For another, she states that she likes words and images but doesn’t know how to combine them. But each title is specific to each painting. She’s famously said a title is the final brushstroke in a piece. While painting, she’d associate such last brush marks with the pieces in progress based on her feelings. A title is thus freely and loosely associated with a painting. And so Yiadom-Boakye’s titles are free and loose, but they are also sourced from the recesses of her mind. Like the figures. It is therefore almost of no use to trouble ourselves with the meanings of the titles. They are poetry to enjoy on the go.

Then the figures—her figures. These people are fictional. Surely they’re inspired by scrapbooks, drawings, collected material, etc. But she draws them from her imagination, her memory. In the moment. One reason for this: she isn’t interested in the personality of a seated model, friend or family. She wants to paint people, not players. She wants to create souls, not attitudes. She’d had people sit for her in the past but couldn’t get much out of them, realizing she wanted the depictions to be figures pulled out of her mind. Not models who bug the work with the notion of performance. For her, it’s all about the paintings. Or, better still, the people. “The work is about translating paint into people.” 

These people are often freed from preconceived notions. Their generic outfits do not reference a particular period, place, group, taste, or trend. They in fact come from color decisions. If the figures are busy and in motion, the outfits might be plain, a “non-outfit.” If they are still, then the outfits might be more definite—a sweatsuit, say. “A lot of the time, the clothes function as uniforms when you look at them across a series of works,” the artist has said. As for shoes, they wear none. Shoes could be too specific. They could be historical pointers. To circumvent their specificity, their historicity, she ditches them.

Similarly, referential and nostalgic markers are done away with, as much as possible; the paintings reduced to their bare, most essential minimum: people. For example, most of the images are situated outdoors, eschewing the need to depict furniture, often suggestive of an era. The paintings become “timeless.” The people become “timeless.” (The artist is interested in this kind of timelessness for it is power. By this, perhaps, she means the power that comes with the freedom of being what you insist on being, untethered to the assumptions and expectations of others.)

Thus, Yiadom-Boakye’s figures aren’t representative of politics. They are human—free of the strictures of specificity. This fact holds whether they are alone or in pairs, threes, or in larger groups. Ditto when the figures are with some familiars: a cat, a parrot, an owl, an eagle. Or when holding ornamentals such as a bouquet of flowers. They are all of themselves by themselves and for themselves. And they are what Black people, especially from a white perspective, never were, never meant to be, at least at first sight: human. This here is one way to paint Édouard Glissant’s theory of opacity in colors.

As Glissant maintains in Poetics of Relation, all that makes us who we are cannot be fully grasped. For the philosopher, writer and critic, definitions and translations often overlook the aspects of self that are difficult to understand. Insistent defining or translating is simplifying, reducing, othering. Different persons, peoples, cultures, should be allowed to remain different, difficult, complex. Different but not othered. Different but part of our whole. To try to simplify them is to dissolve them into stereotypes. To try to translate them is to reduce them. In their wholeness they are complex. In their complexity they are whole. Glissant thus calls for the right to opacity for every person, every people.

Yiadom-Boakye answers the call—and in their opacity, in her refusal to make them transparent, to translate them, to simplify them, her figures are the more nuanced, alive, their selfhood poignant, visible. This is where her poetic titling really hits home. A literal title, which is a form of labelling Glissant talks about, would delimit the work or simplify it; tying the figures to, say, a particular racial event; tying them down to politics; taking away the multiplicative essence of their being, the multiplying effect of the work, flattening the experience for the viewer. A literal title would liquidate the poetic existence of these gorgeous people. Rather, the mysterious titles keep them vague and safe, difficult but whole, different but not othered, evoking a full sense of being.

But we still bring our own fantasies to the paintings. We think since the painter is Black and the figures are dark like her, then the work must be personal, political. Hardly surprising. From racism to colonialism to slavery to neo-colonialism, Blackness is often seen within the context of oppression, is often thought a thing of politics. Barely is it considered first as simply being a state of existence, of be-ing. But the stretch of politics for the artist is the fact that she is “here and doing” the work. “The confusions and the conditions within the work are the politics.” Anything beyond that is flourish. As she explains: “I think it’s always in some way political. But for me the political is as much in the making of it, in the painting of it, in the fact of doing it, rather than anything very specific about race or even about celebration.”

She doesn’t however mind that the first things people see are the racial dynamics. Just that the first thing she’s thinking about is the painting itself: the short strokes, the deep colors, the composition, the perspective. She wants us to come to the images and see all these captivating humans in all their muted glory and calm aliveness. They aren’t a shorthand for racial consciousness. They aren’t a palette of ethics. They are themselves. What is personal or political for the artist is: “What is visual and felt.” Her biggest political statement, then, is that, as Zadie Smith infers, figurative painting is also about brushstrokes, color choice, length, size, and so on, as much as abstract art is. It, too, is about technique. It, too, is about the process. It, too, is about the act, the art. 

PERHAPS the most visible link between the artist’s two praxes, then, is no link at all: vagueness. The stories, as previously noted, are fabulistic. They court no apparent meaning. They are vague. Take Problems With The Moon. We don’t specifically know the problem with the moon. We know what happens when the moon goes rogue, but we don’t know why Selene, goddess of the moon, curses the moon. We do know, though, that Selene unleashes the problem. We know, too, who this Moon-Mischief, an alliteration of misfortune, affects the most: Wives, Mothers, Baby Girls, and teenage girls. But not why. While we know the characters enough, we don’t know perhaps the most specific thing about them: names. What we are offered, instead, are their generic labels: Girl, Grandmother, Parents, Aunt, Uncle, Vicar, husband, and wife. Throughout the story, one of her longest, no character is called a specific name. Or answers to one.

Asked if her “non-political,” non-reductive paintings of Black people inform her writing, the artist offers: “Not directly, but there is something common. The same thread of logic runs through my writing and painting. It’s something to do with having a particular way of thinking creatively. I really enjoy building characters and making them nuanced in a way that I am not sure the paintings are.” Though there is something common to both, she adds, she keeps them separate. “I feel the painting has a certain type of narrative in mind that stops short of an end of a sentence.” Well, I am sure her painted figures are nuanced—if not more than, then as much as, her written characters. For me, a people with their humanity whole and full and undiluted is more than nuanced. 

But I can see, as you can if you look. I can see the paintings and the stories as parallel narratives, both sharing a single vocabulary, like idioms of the same language: the language of opacity. This is most obvious in the characters, the figures and the people depicted in her work. The characters in her stories comprise both humans and animals: Owl, Pigeon, Fox, Jackdaw, Carrion Crow, Hyena. Supernatural and mythological forces, too: mermaids, nymphs, sirens, Poseidon, and Selene. Combined, they all give her fiction much of its fantastical feel.

But is there a catch here? A slight humor maybe? Is the abundance of animal characters saying something? Could that be a point about how, when it is a cat or a fox, we rarely think, first and foremost, of reductive and simplifying information such as breed or species? Why then should we compromise when it comes to humans? Why must we impose our fantasies on human characters despite visible effort to resist such insistence?

The problem is not that we can escape race or racial politics when we see Black people on a canvas, in a painting. The problem is that we, by default, bring our presumptions of a world that suppresses Blackness, Black being-ness—an anti-black world, so that what we see are not Black humans but a people poised against oppressions, a people resisting a suppressive system, like prey in the wild. We often fail to first and foremost see Black people as what and who they are: human. Yiadom-Boakye’s work is a corrective to this existential-cum-political big blind spot syndrome. I guess even non-politics is a form of politics and non-political intent, political. A contradiction I’m willing to concede. Politics is what we breathe, after all. Yet I will be the first to admit that I have little patience for political readings of Yiadom-Boakye’s work. She wants us to see her people as people. So do I.

Actually, the human characters in her stories are similar to the subjects of her paintings. Rarely are we certain as to who they are. Except that they are human. We can’t for one tell their race. Details-but-stereotypes-really like names, neighborhoods, food, or dialects—that can function as labeling—are avoided as much as possible. Revealing details such as complexion or hair type aren’t offered. Actually, Patti G West, of Plans of the Night III, has “wild black eyes.” But so could anybody. And Patti and Walter Fitzgerald V, whose names, perhaps unexpectedly, sound more white than black, dance to jazz music. But so could any couple of any race or cultural mix. This in fact seems to be the point: We can’t always come to a piece by a Black artist with the first instinct that the work must be personal or political. The paintings and the writings express one single fact: that their subjects are human beings. Why can’t we express the same? At least as a first reaction? At least as a default, automated response?

LET us now consider The Hours Behind You, based on a moment from Melinda Ring’s 2010 dance X, with our presumptions cast away like evil spirits. These women: who are they, really? What are they thinking of? Why are they dancing? The woman whose wrists cross: what is she thinking of or praying about? Is she having a vision? Does she have a sweet tooth? What’s her happiest moment in life? Does she like wafers? Does she like suya? Can she stand cold baths? The woman whose leg is raised high: does she have a plant on her window ledge she waters every morning? Does she like indie rock music? Does she do love? Does she read Hemingway? Or Zadie Smith? The woman whose head is tilted the most: what is her biggest fear in life? Does she like swimming? Any allergies? Is she vegan? What’s her favourite color? Does she like the smell of detergent? Does she sweat on her palms?

Clearly, vague is more. What we get when we do away with presumptions is rich, complex, multiplying. The questions change. The light shifts. Amen, hallelujah. With politics out of the way, the essence of being broadens, the circle of meaning expands, the equation of existence deepens, the poetry of relation flowers, the parable of oneness widens, the alchemy of connection swells, the lullaby of silence softens, the science of interiority advances, the expanse of life thickens and thickens and thickens.

Let us yet again consider these people. These women are so alike. The dresses are the same. The skin tone, the hair, the height. Or almost the same. Can these be five reflections of a single self? Are these five different poses of a single being, a single person? Each is then no longer herself. Each is different but part of a whole. Each is different but part of an “all.” Each is all. All is each. All is herself. All is one single self. All is all but one person. The dance is conducted in a circle. The motion is circular, suggesting this single self in different poses is round, full, whole, complete. A self settled into its sense of being.

Indeed the questions change and the light shifts.

And all these lead us, if only by an inch, to a better understanding of what we cannot fully grasp. They deepen our appreciation of this stellar art making. Knowingly, we now come to her work, our sixth sense vibrating. But we can’t pick up the sources of the vibration. We perceive but cannot articulate. We sense but cannot locate. Still, meanings aren’t dangled before our eyes. They are simply unstated. And so we know and we don’t know. We don’t know, for our presumptions—brought to the work as they are—are not confirmed. And we know, for we see people like these figures all the time, for they are us and we are them. These are the affordances of a vague art. This, here, is art that teaches us comfort when specks of doubt inflect our expectations of certainty. Art that teaches us the efficacy of non-knowledge. Art that emphasizes the human.