Sinning isn’t what it used to be. The concept of going against divine law is meant to be a warning, a code to obey. But no one likes being told what to do, so sins have become dangerously, deliciously appealing.That’s literally the opposite of the point, and it’s a conflict that tickles British artist Chris Ofili, whose huge recent paintings here relish in the complex, forbidden appeal of transgression.
This is Ofili at his most ethereal, glowing and playful. Each of the seven canvases is filled with bioluminescent dots and shimmering soft pastel colours. There are curving, undulating phallic and vulvic flowers, gushes of water, streams of golden sunlight. The figure of the satyr – huge and hulking – dominates lots of the works, a mythical figure beyond sin, seeming to both tempt and restaurant the other figures.
A woman made of countless pointilist dots swings above a n ink black satyr in one work, millions of nude figures spill out of a fountain in another. Bodies mingle and twist and combine, they morph into flowers and grass and sunlight.
Ofili paints sin not as a transgression, but as nature following its course, as bodies becoming one with the earth, with myth, with the earth. It’s all sensual, human, biological, sexual.
Not all of it is great. The composition of the waterfall work is a bit unwieldy, and some fo the flower painting is a little teenage. But when it works, it’s a glowing, orgiastic, summery celebration of sin. It’s so full of art historical references it’s like an explosion in the Musée d’Orsay. The dots of Seurat, the colour of Chagall, the hazy myth of Redon, but all unmistakable, uniquely, sinfully Ofili.
