ARTnotes

NOW’S THE TIME
Jean- Michel Basquiat at the Art Gallery of Ontario

What makes Basquiat   great is the insight with which he addresses  the question Who Am I?  and by extension, Who Are We? As the artist said himself, he had not seen a black man in  art.  A passionate confrontation with racism  and social injustice informs his virtuoso output. In fact the title of the exhibition is taken from a speech by Martin Luther King.

Basquiat’s works are mostly figurative, combined with idiosyncratic signs, graffiti- like markings and  word lists layered with paint or/ and  collage. His portraits stand out for their vitality,  and passionate honesty.  Untitled, 1981,(above) is large.  Brilliantly hued, complex and revealing, the features and forehead are divided by a line that tries to stitch the divided self back together. Untitled/Self Portrait, 1984, is a medium sized line drawing in oil stick of a vibrant, dread locked Basquiat trapped, like a genie in a bottle.

He pays homage to Picasso in an intimately scaled drawing, Young PICASSO, 1984, oil stick on paper. Like Picasso he combines sensitive contour lines, distorted forms, and breathtaking colour in strong compositions that strike at the heart while engaging the mind.  

In Six Crimee, 1983 a very large work on three Masonite panels, in acrylic and oil stick, a line of six male heads float across the upper third of the work on an impasto background of luminous greens as beautifully transcendent as Munch’s deathbed greens, and the context suggests that this is a memorial to six youths who have died young on the street. The artist has scratched through thick paint to create games of hangman and X’s and O’s which also suggest the city, graffiti and hieroglyphs of a personal kind. Two portraits of his friend Michael Stewart, arrested for spray- painting, then beaten to death by the arresting officers hang nearby. 

Three works from the mid-eighties when Basquiat collaborated with Andy Warhol are displayed in the last of four large galleries.  In the most disturbing, Florida, 1984, Warhol stenciled the name of the state in thick black letters along with a dollar sign and the  number  seventy-nine. Jean –Michel added the outline of a glaring sun, the British word for gas- petrol, and a Pinocchio-like character in a top hat. The work is prescient –the hanging chads of 2000. It’s a strong antidote to vacation brochure Florida which blots out the history of slavery and the reality of oppression, poverty and corruption.

Basquiat sometimes felt forced to give to his dealers works he did not consider finished, the demand for them was so fierce. But EXU, 1988 one of Basquiat’s last works, shows the artist as a warrior/ god. Here he recaptures the intense energy of his earlier works in an explosive burst of paint and oil stick. Another painting entitled, Obnoxious Liberals, 1982 provokes  the uncomfortable feeling that I may be one of them, as I glide from piece to piece in this revealing, hard-hitting exhibition by a great artist of the late twentieth century.
The time is always now for art like this.