Chris Ofili - The Seven Deadly Sins

 

Was it the elephant dung that put me off? I loathe a gimmick in art, no matter what kind of metaphorical weight it is there to support. And the fact that Chris Ofili was famed for using elephant dung in his work, led to a wariness that has lasted right up until a few weeks ago and an encounter with his series of paintings The Seven Deadly Sins.

To step through the door of the Victoria Miro Gallery on a drab, grey Islington afternoon, and to be met by a blaze of lush tropical colours, was a long overdue awakening to the power of Ofili's work. There are seven massive canvasses in this collection, that initially - particularly if you've not read the handout - find you following the rubric of matching up a sin to an image. Although I always seem to forget at least two of the sins and have to reach for my phone - 'wrath' and 'greed' (which gluttony, to my mind, ought to have covered) - are the ones that escape me. Anyway, that's not the case. Each canvas amalgamates more than one particular sin, perhaps suggesting that if you are going to go full on with one vice, why spare the other six. 

Chris Ofili, The Great Beauty

The space at the gallery - a large, rectangular room downstairs, a similar sized space upstairs, window-lit under latticed wooden beams - causes you to fix yourself at the centre of the lower room, lingering and finding your bearings. The birdwatcher in me was immediately drawn to a Great Egret, taking off into the top right corner of the The Great Beauty. From there I worked down and across, my eyes travelling over and along flowers and tendrils, taking in the sumptuous array of colour, and eventually alighting on the shadowy arm that had sprung Carrie-like from the brown soil and undergrowth. These works are first and foremost sensual ones, and it is only when you settle that the search for meaning and sin can begin. The Great Egret - one of two in the painting - has thrown its shadow across the ground, merging into the suddenly discernible body attached to the arm. From a position of sloth, the arm seems to flay enviously at the flight of the bird. Two of the sins ticked off then. There's a languorous quality to this scene, and one that conjured up lines from Tennyson's 'The Lotos Eaters'. This is a place where it 'seemed always afternoon'. Indeed, the multi-coloured dots that generously pepper these paintings seem to cast a spell, an enchanted pollen, perhaps, that causes the 'languid air to swoon' and cast off all sense of purpose or work.

 
So much so, that making my way upstairs to the second gallery I felt weary, willing myself the wings of the Great Egret. It was worth it just to see the most unusual of the seven works. The Fall From Grace crackled with familiarity.

 

Chris Ofili, The Fall From Grace

It wasn't just the title that sparked ideas of William Blake, but the content too: the sun from The Ancient of Days and The Great Red Dragon, twisted and reimagined and sent tumbling in a striated fizz of colour.
 
Pride is the central sin here. Lucifer falling in tandem with Icarus - together at last - flashed across my mind. And not it wasn't just Blake who I was thinking of. Having recently encountered the work of Hilma af Klint, I couldn’t help but think of her Group X, Altarpieces. The rainbow colours of the Swedish mystic's work, currently on show at Tate Modern, sound a less geometric echo in Ofili's 'Fall'. Both works would make a great image for a paperback Carl Jung primer was my lasting and slightly bathetic though.  

Chris Ofili, The Swing 

The work that drew me back for a further look was The Swing. The title had resonated and I immediately thought of Jean-Honoré Fragonard's namesake painting, and how, having recently seen the latter post-restoral at the Wallace Collection, I sensed a similar exuberance of palette. It was only on the second look, though, that my tortoise mind found its way to the finishing line, realising that Ofili's painting was a full-on version of the Fragonard. My word, I can be slow.

Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing (1768)

And one of the sins that coyly raises an eyebrow in the Rococo painting is fully exposed in the Ofili. Our lurking aristocrat, metamorphosed into a cloven-hooved satyr replete with a long tendril of a tail, is now on the cusp of being lustfully engulfed by a gloriously undisguised metaphor. If anything, the dynamism of Fragonard’s work is even more enhanced here - everything is so alive, a fecund explosion of growth, teetering on the edge of consummation. Lust is very much to the fore. But there's also a sense of gluttony - perhaps all of these paintings, a feast of colour, find room for that one. And in the prone figure, once again we get sloth. Me too. The desire to ruminate and spend a little more time with these paintings was strong. My lunch hour was up though. No sloth for me. I stepped back outside and made my way past the drive-through McDonald's and the grim petrol station forecourt, but Ofili's work had done its job. 

Taking a breath, a few days later, I begin to unpack elements of the Ofili's 'Swing' and its restored precursor. The Fragonard blazes far more brightly that it did before. Your eyes roam everywhere now, no longer settling on the airborne shoe - which incidentally, finds its own echo in Ofili at the end of the satyr's tail - but rather delves into the undergrowth and shadows of the lush surroundings, suddenly deeper and more dangerous (and containing a little, yappy dog which I'd never noticed before). Do those shadows in the Fragonard now find their own outlet in Ofili's shadowy satyr, the unknown made flesh? And does the greater explicitness in the Ofili send you back to the Fragonard, interpreting the flora and foliage in a sexual way? Whatever, I'm won over to Ofili's work and want to explore more. Each of these huge canvases contain legions. They are whole realms of transgression, both an invitation and a caution, inviting you in and urging you to stay awhile, to learn lessons or pursue adventure. Gimmicks don't do that.