RON HENGGELER

May 2, 2023
Kehinde Wiley: An Archaeology of Silence

at the De Young Museum

American artist Kehinde Wiley’s new body of paintings and sculptures confronts the silence surrounding systemic violence against Black people through the visual language of the fallen figure. It expands on his 2008 series, Down — a group of large-scale portraits of young Black men inspired by Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521–1522). Wiley investigates the iconography of death and sacrifice in Western art, tracing it across religious, mythological, and historical subjects. In An Archaeology of Silence, the senseless deaths of men and women around the world are transformed into a powerful elegy of resistance. The resulting paintings of figures struck down, wounded, or dead, referencing iconic paintings of mythical heroes, martyrs, and saints, offer a haunting meditation on the legacies of colonialism and systemic racism. From: famsf.org

Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) has dedicated his artistic career to uplifting the beauty and power of Black people, in particular young Black men, who often function in his work as stand-ins for himself. Over the past twenty years, he has received wide acclaim for projecting his subjects into positions of authority and grace by painting-and more recently sculpting -them in compositions inspired by famous Western portraits. Wiley's figures often triumphantly occupy cultural spaces traditionally reserved for white royalty, clergy, or nobility, as he interrogates his subjects" exclusion from such historical representations. At the same time, such works offer an acerbic commentary on the codified and commodified attributes of Black masculinity in Western society that demand the repression of any type of human vulnerability.
It is this vulnerability that unites the subjects- Black men and women-of An Archaeology of Silence. In this new body of work, Wiley rejects the heroic language of portraiture and its insistence on verticality. Instead, he foregrounds the symbolism of death and sacrifice as embodied through the art historical motif of the recumbent figure. His horizontal Black figures, in often ambiguous states of pain, grief, sleep, or death, reference iconic Western paintings and sculptures of fallen heroes, lovers, martyrs, or saints-conjuring pain and ecstasy, suffering and transcendence. Wiley also explores the European tradition of eroticizing the martyred body, beginning with that of Christ's, in order to seduce viewers into adoration and reverence. Thus, he connects the epic, historical dimension of violence against Black people with the legacy of the spectacularized sacred, drawing our attention to a reality deeply understood by Black persons but silenced by socially dominant powers for far too long.

Sleep, 2022
Oil on canvas
Moco Museum

Morpheus, 2021
Bronze

Dying Gaul, after a Roman Sculpture of the 1st Century, 2021
Bronze

Morpheus
(Ndeye Fatou Mbaye), 2022
Oil on canvas

 Femme Piquée par un Serpent

(Mamadou Gueye)

2022

Oil on canvas

Christian Martyr Tarcisius

(El Hadji Malick Gueye)

2021

Bronze

The Death of Hyacinth (Ndey Buri Mboup)

2022

Oil on canvas 

Death of Two Soldiers

2021

Bronze

Youth Mourning

2021

Bronze

Detail of: Youth Mourning

2021

Bronze

An Archaeology of Silence, 2021
Bronze

The exhibition's title giving work, An Archaeology of Silence, reformulates Kehinde Wiley's 2019 sculpture Rumors of War, originally created for exhibition in New York City's Times Square. Both sculptures are based on a monument to Confederate army General James Ewell Brown Stuart created by Frederick Moynihan in 1907, one of several equestrian sculptures erected in Richmond, Virginia, to honor generals who defended slavery in the South.
However, where Rumors of War features a proudly erect Black rider, the work here depicts a fallen figure. This sculpture radically reverses the equestrian monument's traditional iconography, which celebrates military prowess as an assertion of state power. As in much of his work, Wiley subverts the legacies of a historical tradition to shift the focus from the oppressor (the silencer) to the oppressed (the silenced) to center the global stories of Black people.
The title, An Archaeology of Silence, refers to a phrase by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, who used it to describe the action of making visible a socially repressed phenomenon. Foucault linked it to the artist's ability to "speak truth" unscathed. Wiley, who often refers to himself as a trickster, conjures this romantic fantasy as a means to break the cycle of suppression and shine a light upon the madness of systemic racism behind the official silence that continues to inform violence toward Black people in and beyond the Americas.

Detail of: An Archaeology of Silence

2021
Bronze

Detail of: An Archaeology of Silence

2021
Bronze

Detail of: An Archaeology of Silence

2021
Bronze

Detail of: An Archaeology of Silence

2021
Bronze

Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos

2022

Bronze

THE
TRANSCENDENCE
OF LIGHT
Kehinde Wiley describes the "strange irony" embedded in his address of violence, which "has to be filtered through white European culture in order to be seen as valuable." The artist further reflects that "it is only through seeing these Black bodies in that space that we can now adjust our gaze and say maybe it is worthwhile." He counters this cruel fact by imbuing his subjects with beauty, dignity, humanity, and individuality, further emphasizing their personhood by including the models' names in the works' titles.
This humanity is enhanced by Wiley's treatment of light, which bathes the bodies in his paintings in an aura of sacredness. Such illumination resembles the treatment of the divine in European painting, originating in the veneration of Christ, the foundation of the concept of naturalized whiteness at the core of structural racism. In Wiley's paintings, light infuses the figures with a sense of otherworldly ecstasy that transcends their precarious conditions. The backgrounds of decaying and flowering flora both envelop and consume the figures, reinforcing their inscription into a narrative of death and renewal. The lighting of the sculptures creates a similar effect: using only precise spots that leave the space around the works in darkness, the artist imbues each piece with a sense of drama and pathos that inspires reverence and admiration.

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

(Babacar Mane)

2021

Bronze and wooden frame with gold letters

Entombment after Titian, 1559

2021

Bronze

THE
IMPORTANCE OF SCALE
In this body of work, Kehinde Wiley strategically used scale to conjure a grand sensibility generally absent from the depictions of the fallen or recumbent figure in Western art-with some paintings intentionally reaching the size of billboards. Billboards employ the same visual strategies as history painting, a type of representational painting that serves to communicate the goals of state and empire. As such, Wiley's larger-than-life works respond to the absurd coexistence of structural racism that perpetuates state-sanctioned abuse of the Black populace and the capitalist exploitation of hip-hop culture and its exaggerated masculinity. Together, these phenomena create a "spectacle brought to you by the formerly enslaved," says Wiley.
This body of work also contains some of the smallest artworks the artist has ever made, in particular a group of bronzes that invite a more contemplative form of address. The interplay between the modest and the monumental-described by the artist as a series of contractions and expansions-connects the intimacy of individual suffering with the magnitude of systemic oppression.

Reclining Nude (Babacar Mané), 2022
Oil on canvas

Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

Detail of: Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

Detail of: Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

Detail of: Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

Young Tarentine (Mamadou Gueye)

2021

Bronze

The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb

(Babacar Mane)

2021

Bronze and wooden frame with gold letters

Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos

2022

Bronze

Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos

2022

Bronze

Detail of: Morpheus (Ndeye Fatou Mbaye)

2022

Oil on canvas

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