Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Amoako Boafo
Ghanaian; 21st-century
Chicago, IL: EXPO Chicago (Allouche Gallery’s Booth)
63%
Umbrella. Oil on canvas. c2020
Boafo's among the most serious actual painters of the whole Black Figuration thing, which comprises many charlatans. You can see it in this piece, which is not a guitar solo by any means but which is a minor achievement of design. There's nothing too impressive about the way the background and the subject's clothes are big solid planes, but there is something impressive about the way the umbrella tilts back into flatness and then right off the edge of the image up top. There's intentionality to Boafo's brushwork, too, not just in the deliberately overworked face and hands — that's his trademark — but more subtly in the less articulated moments like the umbrella's panels. The consonances and dissonances between these two versions of Boafo's facture is a point of interest. If all of this is clearly mannered, it's also refined and intentional. You can see that much in the wedge of background in the top left corner, or in the poise with which the subject angles the umbrella's stem opposite the tilt of her own body. (2025)