At first, Chris Ofili’s Requiem came as a shock. I am well used to the languid, dreamlike qualities Ofili’s art nowadays presents us with: the distortions, the profuse vegetation, the swooning elongations, the ravishing cascades of corpuscular light, the satyrs and the lovers and the night. What stopped me today on the staircase at Tate Britain, whose surrounding walls his painting occupies, was the uneasy collision of idiom and subject matter, and all completed on such an ambitious scale.
In Requiem, there are references to the early Italian Renaissance and to classical myth, to the Babylon of Rastafarian belief, to unseen dimensions and to a kind of paradise. The rising waters in Requiem can be read both as an ocean of tears, and as the waters of Venice – where Ofili met the young Gambian British artist Khadija Saye for the first and last time in 2017, shortly before she and her mother died in the Grenfell Tower fire.
Requiem occupies a transitory space, and also presents the transition between life and death, grief and acceptance, mourning and anger. Grenfell Tower is rendered as a kind of burning cage, its gridded windows lit by flames. Swathes of smoke and fire wreathe the tower like a conflagration in a brazier, held out, as if on a tray, by a man who bows deeply, like a master of ceremonies or a frock-coated conjurer. Which, I suppose, is also the role of the priest in a church service (Ofili himself was once a Manchester altar boy). High on the next wall, Ofili has painted Saye, whose image is based on one of her own photographic works in which she presents herself holding a Gambian incense burner, or andichurai, to her ear. Saye grew up attending church with her Christian mother and the mosque with her Muslim father. In Ofili’s version, Saye is surrounded by a circle of swirling, vaporous beings. These wraiths or spirits begin as smudges in the red-lit night around the tower (recalling the small afro heads in Ofili’s earlier paintings) and approach a more human, albeit vestigial form as they make their way around the walls, fading as we come to the hairy cloven-hoofed satyr lounging with his pipe under the tree in a lurid sunset on the third wall of Ofili’s painting. We find him right at the top of the stairs, one louche hoof almost poking out of the door.
Ofili’s 1998 work No Woman, No Cry (also on display at Tate Britain, as is a series of drawings and watercolours that share a room with William Blake) is dominated by a profile of a young woman, whose tears all contain small photographic images of the murdered Stephen Lawrence. This, we can infer, is an imaginary portrait of Stephen’s mother Doreen. The painting is complex in all sorts of ways, metaphoric and material. With its balls of elephant dung, its resinous layerings, its map-pins and glitter and fluorescent underpainting, it carries a huge cargo of references and allusions. No Women, No Cry has a kind of density and compression that becomes dissipated over the three walls that Requiem covers. I keep feeling the difficulty and strain of rendering Grenfell burning, of repainting Saye’s self-portrait, of inventing some kind of narrative that can encompass different faiths and beliefs, or the lack of them, and still be true to Ofili’s subject and to his own painting. But such quibbles never bothered Picasso or William Blake or the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé.
Satyrs or fauns are one thing. Fire is hard to depict. Turner managed it in his 1835 depictions of the fire that destroyed the Houses of Parliament in 1834. Goya, in his 1793 Fire of a Hospital (and in so many other works), depicted absolute terror. Can painters any more compete with the TV images we all saw of Grenfell burning, or of the disaster of 9/11? But it isn’t a competition. Gerhard Richter’s small, 2005 painting September distances the viewer from the destruction of the twin towers on 9/11, and makes the actuality all the more horrible by his reticence and understatement. The painting is of much the same size as the screens, in homes and bars and offices, on which the world gawped at the unfolding disaster. Richter avoids spectacle, and almost underplays the event, with his swipes and blurs and modest little canvas. What Richter painted was an image of an image. Ofili’s Grenfell is an idea of a disaster, an almost medieval depiction.
Neither Steve McQueen’s film Grenfell, nor Gillian Slovo’s play Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors at the National Theatre, used images of smoke or fire (so audiences of Slovo’s play were reassured in advance) in their invocations of this wholly avoidable tragedy, whose ultimate culprits are yet to be prosecuted. McQueen’s film, filled with silence and gravity, takes us on a slow approach from the northern edge of London toward Grenfell’s burned-out tower. We circle the tower and stay there. McQueen avoided the salacious and gave us time to encounter and to dwell. Ofili’s Requiem, unfolding around a public stairwell at Tate Britain, is a very different proposition. One might almost take Ofili’s work as a kind of magic realism, though there isn’t much realism here. Nor is he, perhaps, in the business of giving succour. The shuttle between the real and Ofili’s own painted world is difficult to calibrate. It needs more time. The painting will be in situ for a decade.
Chris Ofili: Requiem is at Tate Britain, London
