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Lot Essay
In 2005, on the heels of his representation in the British Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, the Nigerian-born, British artist Chris Ofili moved from London to the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Following in the footsteps of his friend and fellow artist Peter Doig, it was a transformative move, and a decisive turning point in his career and his practice: nature became a new inspiration. In the Blue Rider paintings begun in 2005, which include the present work, forms became more elongated and enigmatic, and the textured surfaces of elephant dung and map pins were discarded in favor of a flattening of the picture plane and layering of paint. Stirred by the subtleties of light during the island’s twilight hours, Ofili also drastically reduced his palette to mysterious depths of languid blues and inky blacks.
In Blue Confession (Lady Chancellor), a voluptuous, Matisse-like odalisque reclines against the silhouette of Trinidad’s Lady Chancellor Hill, the moonlight reflecting in a halo-like crescent against her hair and nipple, as she accepts a cocktail glass from a disembodied male hand in a complicated and ambivalent portrait of temptation, joie de vivre, salvation, and island life. Part of his Devil’s Pie series — inspired by the D’Angelo song of the same name as well as Biblical archetypes — it is an image of such import to the artist that he explored it in several different versions and scales. The chromatic combination of midnight blue and black also signifies for Ofili — literally and symbolically — the exploration of various meanings of Blackness from within the framework of the “Blues” — a signifier of the musical and the emotional meanings of the color. Ultimately these paintings, in flickering in and out of the viewer’s focus on the image, are meant to convey what Ofili experiences among the Blackness of the Trinidadian islanders as the blue and black of twilight falls over the island, and thereby deliver viewers to a spiritual place. A master at drawing from his artistic predecessors and weaving their influence into his own inimitable expression, Ofili also looked to Mark Rothko’s and Ad Reinhardt’s late black paintings and their search for transcendence.
As his contemporary Glenn Ligon observed in his essay for Ofili’s 2014 New Museum retrospective Night and Day, “Blue is a bitch. Temperamental, fugitive, occasionally changing to green over time, it is not an easy color for artists to work with, and the monochromatic canvases Ofili has made represent a deliberate grappling with this difficult. Yet in restricting his palette to shades of a single color, Ofili has found a way to express something fundamental about Trinidad, a means of capturing the feeling of the place. With blue, Ofili creates in his paintings a sense of night, that time of day when things become harder to see, more indistinct, more wondrous” (G. Ligon, “Blue Black,” in M. Gioni, Chris Ofili: Night and Day, exh. cat., New York, New Museum, 2014, p. 82).
In Blue Confession (Lady Chancellor), a voluptuous, Matisse-like odalisque reclines against the silhouette of Trinidad’s Lady Chancellor Hill, the moonlight reflecting in a halo-like crescent against her hair and nipple, as she accepts a cocktail glass from a disembodied male hand in a complicated and ambivalent portrait of temptation, joie de vivre, salvation, and island life. Part of his Devil’s Pie series — inspired by the D’Angelo song of the same name as well as Biblical archetypes — it is an image of such import to the artist that he explored it in several different versions and scales. The chromatic combination of midnight blue and black also signifies for Ofili — literally and symbolically — the exploration of various meanings of Blackness from within the framework of the “Blues” — a signifier of the musical and the emotional meanings of the color. Ultimately these paintings, in flickering in and out of the viewer’s focus on the image, are meant to convey what Ofili experiences among the Blackness of the Trinidadian islanders as the blue and black of twilight falls over the island, and thereby deliver viewers to a spiritual place. A master at drawing from his artistic predecessors and weaving their influence into his own inimitable expression, Ofili also looked to Mark Rothko’s and Ad Reinhardt’s late black paintings and their search for transcendence.
As his contemporary Glenn Ligon observed in his essay for Ofili’s 2014 New Museum retrospective Night and Day, “Blue is a bitch. Temperamental, fugitive, occasionally changing to green over time, it is not an easy color for artists to work with, and the monochromatic canvases Ofili has made represent a deliberate grappling with this difficult. Yet in restricting his palette to shades of a single color, Ofili has found a way to express something fundamental about Trinidad, a means of capturing the feeling of the place. With blue, Ofili creates in his paintings a sense of night, that time of day when things become harder to see, more indistinct, more wondrous” (G. Ligon, “Blue Black,” in M. Gioni, Chris Ofili: Night and Day, exh. cat., New York, New Museum, 2014, p. 82).