Tate Britain, London
Poised, mysterious and yet somehow always the same, the British artist’s allusive paintings elude deeper scrutiny
A black woman trains her binoculars on something we cannot see in the darkness. Another reclines on a couch in sepulchral gloom, in a pose borrowed from Manet. Two black men pull on white socks at dusk, echoing the athletes in a painting by Degas, but in a darkness so obliterating it makes their actions seems conspiratorial, perhaps even ominous.
The paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye are not quite portraits, and never quite narratives. She is not painting from the life, so much as the imagination. In an introductory wall text at Tate Britain, the artist speaks of working from scrapbooks, photographs, assorted images and ideas to paint her black subjects. We are to think of these compositions as fictions, amounting to riddles.