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Thursday 6 February

Titus Kaphar Tears Through the Veil of History

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. If you still think contemporary art is nothing more than flashy digital installations and obscure conceptual performances, it’s high time you meet Titus Kaphar, born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Here is an artist shaking the very foundations of Western art history with the surgical precision of a neurosurgeon and the audacity of a revolutionary.

In his New Haven studio, Kaphar doesn’t just paint. He dissects, cuts, twists, and transforms the canvas as Nietzsche deconstructed traditional values in his “Genealogy of Morals”. Just as the German philosopher questioned the very foundations of Western morality by exposing their complex and often troubling genealogy, Kaphar tackles dominant historical narratives with a methodical ferocity that would make even the most fervent deconstructionists blush. His approach is not that of a mere iconoclast seeking to shock his audience. No, his work is that of a meticulous archaeologist who, layer by layer, reveals the buried strata of our collective history.

Take his masterful work “Behind the Myth of Benevolence” (2014). This depiction of Thomas Jefferson is not just a simple reimagined historical portrait. The canvas, partially folded like a curtain being drawn back, reveals behind the image of the American president the haunting portrait of Sally Hemings, the enslaved woman who bore six of his children. This radical artistic gesture is not merely provocative—it’s a brilliant illustration of Hegel’s concept of the master-slave dialectic. The folded canvas revealing Hemings becomes the physical manifestation of the tension between the visible and the invisible in our national history, between power and submission, between official truth and hidden reality. Kaphar’s genius lies in making this dialectic not only visible but tangible, palpable in the very materiality of his work.

This ability to materialize complex philosophical concepts in the very flesh of his paintings is one of Kaphar’s signatures. In his series “The Jerome Project”, he reaches dizzying heights of social and political insight. Beginning as a personal search for his incarcerated father, he discovered dozens of other men sharing the same name, all imprisoned. He created a series of portraits gilded with gold leaf, partially submerged in tar. The height of the tar corresponds to the time each subject spent in prison. This series resonates powerfully with Michel Foucault’s reflections on the prison system in “Discipline and Punish”. The tar covering these faces is not just a metaphor for social erasure—it is a tangible manifestation of what Foucault called “disciplinary power”, that invisible force marking and transforming the bodies it controls.

His interventions on the pictorial surface are not limited to tar. His “whitening” technique, where he partially covers his subjects with white paint, as seen in “Yet Another Fight for Remembrance” (2014), is another striking example of his ability to transform pictorial technique into social commentary. This work, created in response to the Ferguson protests, shows protesters partially erased by streaks of white paint. This is not a mere stylistic innovation but an act of visual resistance that recalls Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the political nature of art. By partially erasing his subjects while paradoxically making them more visible, Kaphar creates what Benjamin would have called a “dialectical image”—an image that awakens the viewer from historical complacency.

The whitening technique takes on a particularly poignant dimension in “Analogous Colors” (2020), a work that graced the cover of Time Magazine following George Floyd’s murder. A Black mother, her face marked by pain, holds in her arms an empty space cut out of the canvas—the absent silhouette of her child. This heartbreaking work reminds us that Western art history has long ignored the representation of Black mothers, in stark contrast to the countless white Madonnas populating our museums. Kaphar corrects this omission while tragically underscoring the persistent vulnerability of Black children in contemporary society.

In “Space to Forget”, exhibited at the National Gallery of Art, Kaphar pushes his exploration of racial representation in art history even further. He begins with a Baroque-style painting depicting a seemingly innocuous domestic scene. But by cutting and manipulating the canvas, he reveals the implicit racial hierarchies of the original work. The dominant white figures are literally torn from the composition, leaving the Black characters, previously relegated to the background, to finally occupy the center of the image. This surgical intervention into the fabric of the painting is not a mere visual effect—it is a physical rewriting of art history.

Kaphar’s cuts and manipulations are never gratuitous. Every incision into the canvas is like a scalpel opening the unhealed wounds of our collective past. In “The Cost of Removal” (2017), exhibited at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, he transforms a bucolic landscape into a heartbreaking commentary on the forced displacement of Indigenous peoples. The canvas, cut and folded like pages torn violently from a history book, forces us to confront the truths we prefer to ignore. It’s as if Kaphar had taken the notion of “rewriting history” literally, creating works that are themselves visual testimonies of our collective past.

This notion of “rewriting history” is central to his work, particularly evident in his monumental installation “The Vesper Project” (2013). This immersive piece combines painting, sculpture, and architecture to tell the fictional story of a 19th-century African American family “passing” as white. The walls, covered with fragments of Victorian wallpaper, are slashed to reveal other historical layers beneath. Portraits are embedded in the walls, some partially covered or erased, creating a complex dialogue between past and present, memory and oblivion.

The power of Kaphar’s work lies in its ability to transform the act of looking into an act of historical revision. He doesn’t merely create images—he teaches us to see differently. His interventions on the pictorial surface become metaphors for our own work of historical reexamination. Each painting is an invitation to rethink what we believe we know, to question dominant narratives with the same rigor as a philosopher deconstructing a fallacious argument.

The series “From a Tropical Space” (2019) marks a significant evolution in his practice. These vividly colored and unsettling paintings depict Black mothers whose children have been literally cut out of the canvas, leaving empty silhouettes. The toxic pink sky and skeletal palm trees create a dystopian sci-fi atmosphere that contrasts with the realism of the figures. This series transcends mere historical critique to address contemporary anxieties about Black motherhood in a society where children of color remain particularly vulnerable.

In his film “Exhibiting Forgiveness” (2024), Kaphar extends his exploration to the cinematic medium. This semi-autobiographical work, following an artist confronting the reappearance of his drug-addicted father, demonstrates that his quest for historical truth is inseparable from a personal search for reconciliation. The film, like his paintings, refuses easy solutions and simplistic resolutions, preferring to explore the complexity of human relationships and intergenerational trauma.

His commitment extends beyond his personal artistic practice. In 2018, he co-founded NXTHVN, an innovative art incubator in New Haven offering fellowships and mentorship to artists, curators, and students of color. This initiative demonstrates his understanding that the transformation of art cannot occur solely on the canvas—it must also take place within the institutional structures that support artistic creation.

In his world, painting is not just a medium—it is a tool of historical investigation, an instrument of truth that cuts, reveals, and reconstructs our understanding of the past. His works do not merely represent history—they dismantle it, examine it, and rebuild it with a precision that would make a Swiss watchmaker blush. Each painting becomes a site of confrontation between official narratives and suppressed truths, between collective memory and systemic omissions.

If contemporary art still has a role to play in our society (and I assure you it does), it is precisely the one Kaphar assigns to it: not merely to represent or comment on our world but to actively participate in its transformation. His works are not objects to be passively contemplated in the hushed silence of galleries—they are surgical interventions into the very body of our cultural history. By cutting, folding, erasing, and reconstructing his canvases, Kaphar shows us that history is not a fixed narrative but a continuous process of revision and reevaluation.

Kaphar’s technical virtuosity is undeniable, but it is his ability to marry this formal mastery with deep conceptual reflection that makes him one of the most important artists of his generation. His work reminds us that art can be both aesthetically powerful and socially engaged, formally innovative and intellectually rigorous. He demonstrates that painting, far from being an exhausted medium, can still be a powerful tool for interrogating our present and reimagining our future.

So the next time you encounter those snobs who think contemporary art is just a giant conceptual joke, or that painting is a passé medium, show them Kaphar’s work. And if they still don’t get it, they’re probably too busy admiring their reflection in the gilded mirrors of their certainties to see the truth these works reveal. Because Kaphar doesn’t just offer us paintings to contemplate—he gives us tools to rethink our relationship with history, representation, and truth itself.

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