The swing

Chris Ofili, CBE, is one of the most celebrated and influential British painters working today. Born in Manchester in 1968, he moved to London in 1991 and received a BA from the Chelsea School of Art, followed by an MA from the Royal College of Art. Ofili rose to prominence at an early point in his career with his intricate paintings, and at the age of thirty, he became the first black winner of the coveted Turner prize. In 2003 he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale; he was thirty-five and the youngest artist to have a solo exhibition in the British Pavilion.

Since 2005 Ofili has been based in Trinidad, where he painted The Swing. Part of a significant series of paintings, The Swing, a study of lust and desire, explores the seven deadly sins. Using the nineteenth-century technique of priming the verso of the canvas, Ofili then outlined the composition with charcoal before layering nets of tiny circles in metallic pigment. Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist poem of 1876, ‘The afternoon of a faun’ (L’après-midi d’un faune), which famously influenced Debussy, Manet and Nijinsky, is a generative impulse in his work and the starting point for this painting. Also referencing the composition of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 Rococo painting The Swing, Ofili has created an entirely original synthesis of the poem and the painting, drawing on the lush and fertile Caribbean foliage and quality of light where it was painted.

The work displays a dreamlike dance between abstraction and figuration, opacity and translucence, a signature aspect of Ofili’s paintings. The dark cloven-hooved faun (who could equally be a satyr, minotaur or devil) reclines in the undergrowth and seduces the arching figure on the swing above. These beings appear to be composed of light and colour – tiny shimmering dots of pink, yellow and green, which merge with their celestial surroundings. Ofili is interested in concepts of metamorphosis and transformation and The Swing represents the zenith of this investigation.

Leigh Robb, Curator of Contemporary Art