Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Those who still believe that contemporary art is nothing but a succession of empty concepts and incomprehensible installations would do well to realize what Kehinde Wiley has been accomplishing for several decades now. This American portraitist, born in 1977 in Los Angeles, has created nothing less than a pictorial revolution, no, sorry, a complete transformation, of our relationship to the classical portrait and to the representation of the black body in Western art.
His monumental canvases impose their presence with undeniable authority. We cannot simply look at them; they look back at us, question us, and upset our relationship to the history of art. Wiley propels ordinary young black men into glorious postures inspired by the great European masters, thus creating an immediate visual tension that challenges our expectations.
Wiley has the particular gift of creating portraits that seem to vibrate with inexhaustible energy. His subjects, often recruited directly from the streets of New York, Dakar, or London, exude a sovereign presence, framed by meticulous floral motifs and colored backgrounds that evoke both Baroque tapestries and Victorian wallpapers. And yet, nothing in his work is mere appropriation. What operates here is a true alchemical transmutation of the European pictorial language.
By placing contemporary black bodies in postures that directly evoke the European portrait tradition, Wiley engages in a complex dialogue with architecture. I am not talking here about buildings, but about the very structure that underlies our cultural perception. For European classical painting is, in its essence, an architecture of power and privilege. As the French architect Jean Nouvel wrote: “Architecture is, above all, an art of articulation – the articulation of bodies, of space, of memory and of meaning” [1]. And that is precisely what Wiley does: he rearticulates the relationship between body, space, memory and meaning.
Take, for example, his reinterpretation of Officier de hussards by Théodore Géricault. In the original version, we see a white officer on a rearing horse, symbolizing post-revolutionary French military power. In Wiley’s version, it is a young black man in jeans and Timberlands who occupies this dominant position. This is not a simple replacement; it is a complete architectural reconfiguration of the image, a rearrangement of visual codes that asks the question: who has the right to occupy the symbolic space of power?
This architectural question is all the more relevant when we consider that the edifices of power, museums, government palaces, financial institutions, are precisely the places where European classical art has been consecrated as canon. By introducing his portraits into these same institutions, Wiley does not merely decorate the walls; he reconfigures the symbolic architecture of the place. As the architecture critic Rem Koolhaas noted: “Architecture is a dangerous mixture of power and powerlessness” [2]. Wiley’s works exploit precisely this tension.
The other interesting aspect of Wiley’s work is its relationship with psychoanalysis, particularly in its treatment of black masculinity. His portraits challenge not only racial stereotypes but also the psychic constructions of virility and desire. By adorning his male subjects with postures traditionally associated with European nobility, he exposes and subverts what Franz Fanon called the “historico-racial schema” imposed on black bodies.
In his series like “The World Stage”, Wiley questions the way black bodies are both hypervisible and invisible in Western culture. This duality recalls the Lacanian concept of the gaze (the “gaze”), that oppressive consciousness of being seen, objectified, which determines our own way of seeing ourselves. As Jacques Lacan wrote: “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” [3]. Wiley’s subjects look directly at us, reversing the traditional “gaze” of Western art where black bodies were relegated to the margins, depicted as servants or as exotic curiosities.
This psychoanalytic inversion is particularly evident in his series “Down”, where black bodies are represented lying down or in apparent positions of vulnerability. These works refer to classical representations of Christian martyrs, but they also inevitably evoke contemporary images of violence against black bodies. By juxtaposing these traumatic resonances with the formal beauty of classical painting, Wiley creates what the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva would call a space of “abjection”, a place where the boundaries between beauty and horror, power and vulnerability dissolve.
Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama for the National Portrait Gallery perhaps represents the apogee of this psychoanalytic work. By depicting the first African American president simply seated on a chair, surrounded by symbolic vegetation (flowers representing Hawaii, Chicago and Kenya), Wiley avoids the usual trappings of the presidential portrait. No desk, no flag, no ostentatious signs of power. Obama is presented as a thoughtful, human, complex man, a representation that defies the unconscious expectations we may have of a presidential portrait, and more broadly, of a black man in power.
What truly distinguishes Wiley is that he creates works that are both politically incisive and aesthetically sumptuous. There is no contradiction between his critical engagement and his evident love for the formal beauty of painting. His canvases are visual feasts, the richness of colors, the technical precision, the complexity of floral motifs, all bear witness to a painter who understands and deeply respects the tradition he subverts.
And that is precisely what makes his work so powerful. For unlike so many contemporary artists who reject the Western pictorial heritage outright, Wiley embraces it to better transform it. It is not about demolishing the museum, but about reinventing it, opening it up, making it alive for audiences who felt excluded from it. As he himself declared: “We know that museums and institutions, like art, have to respond to the world that they’re in, in order to stay current, in order to survive, in order to correspond to the society that surrounds them… It’s an exciting opportunity to take a stodgy old language and breathe into it the vibrant now” [4].
In doing so, Wiley highlights the absurdity of our artistic system which too often continues to consider Western art as universal and non-Western art as specific. His works force us to recognize that every artistic tradition, including that of Europe, is culturally situated, historically contingent. Wiley’s genius is to make us see this contingency not as a limitation, but as an invitation to reimagine what art can be and do.
Certainly, one could reproach Wiley for a certain formal redundancy in some of his series, or question the semi-industrial production of his works in his Peking studio. One could also wonder if his commercial and institutional success risks blunting the critical edge of his work. But that would be missing the essential: Wiley has succeeded in making contemporary figurative painting a vital field of exploration for questions of representation, identity and power that are at the heart of our era.
In 2018, Time magazine included him in its list of the “100 most influential people”, a recognition that far exceeds the art world. What is remarkable is that Wiley has achieved this influence not by abandoning painting for more “contemporary” forms of art, but by demonstrating that painting itself can be a radical medium, capable of transforming our way of seeing and being seen.
Wiley’s latest works, such as his series “An Archaeology of Silence” exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2022, show an artist who continues to evolve, to take risks, to deepen his vision. These darker works, which meditate on the vulnerability of black bodies in the face of state violence, prove that Wiley is much more than a ceremonial painter. He is an artist capable of capturing the tensions and traumas of our time while imagining possibilities of beauty, dignity and transcendence.
What makes Kehinde Wiley such an important artist today is his ability to build bridges, between past and present, between tradition and innovation, between social critique and aesthetic pleasure. In an artistic world often divided between conservative formalists and radical conceptualists, Wiley reminds us that great painting has always been both: formally demanding and intellectually daring, sensual and cerebral, personal and political.
So the next time you come across one of his monumental canvases in a museum or at the Templon gallery, in Paris or New York, take the time to really look. Do not be content to admire the technical virtuosity or to decode the political message. Let yourself be taken into this complex game of gaze, desire, power and beauty that Wiley orchestrates so masterfully. For it is precisely in this space between visual enjoyment and critical consciousness that his art operates its deepest magic.
- Nouvel, Jean. “Architecture and Freedom: Conversations with Jean Baudrillard”, Éditions Galilée, Paris, 2003.
- Koolhaas, Rem. “S,M,L,XL”, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1995.
- Lacan, Jacques. “The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis”, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1973.
- Kadish Morris. “Kehinde Wiley”, interview in The Guardian, 21 November 2021.
