Articles Available Online

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Bound Over To Keep The Peace, 2012, commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London Photo: Marcus Leith *   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a high street studio portrait photographer: a torso, half-twisted towards you, a hand is placed on a leg, another holds up to the face a pendant, dangling on a long, thin chain which dips down and reaches up around the neck   The person’s head and face are covered in brushstrokes which appear as crude as those which describe the dark space behind, a failure to discriminate between the subject and background which feels like an aggression against the person The face is so dis-affected that the author of this subject seems disinterested – almost uncannily so – in representing the body as human The eyes are intense dashes of white, as are the teeth, bared in a smile, and the paint here, applied with more care, is thick, cartoonish This smiling face appears charged with some satirical intent by the invisible hand of the artist, whose biography the gallery hand-out has summarised for our reassurance The subject is not given a name, nor is the viewer given any context for what, for want of a better word, I have described as satire On closer attention to the painting, any cheerfulness coaxed out of the subject by the studio photographer (who is, after all, probably only doing his job) appears forced to the point of a violent ambivalence The person’s left hand, resting on the left leg, is outlined by spaces of white canvas with an apparent lack of care, and the person seems to be digging the nails of their hand into their own leg, as if fighting to contain the desire to break out of the painting   Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, the maker of these paintings, born in London in 1977, is among the first generation of artists to reach maturity in the twenty-first century Her inclusion in The Ungovernables, the triennial exhibition at the New