Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is pleased to present Winter Remembers April, Shaqúelle Whyte’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled in homage to Wynton Marsalis’ interpretation of the jazz standard, I’ll Remember April, the exhibition honours several of Whyte’s musical heroes, from Boris Gardiner and Gil Scott-Heron, to The Beatles.
In this new body of work, Whyte continues to explore non-linear time – in many of his paintings, the past, present and future converge on a single point as individual figures unfold through myriad physical and psychological permutations. Just slow down, don't you know that the revolution will be televised? depicts a seated man as he rises from the ground, each movement articulated sequentially, in the manner of photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s locomotion studies. A shoal of carp swim around the figure’s feet, further destabilising the composition. Like Francis Bacon before him, Whyte finds inspiration not in the order of action, but in the opposite. Distortion and chaos are paramount in a body of work concerned with the philosophy of entropy.
Although marked by a feeling of impermanence, Whyte’s work is equally engaged in the notion of circularity, especially with regards to the Black male body, positing that the concerns of the Black artist are unchanged since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Prometheus Bound; sky burial presents the climactic moment in the eponymous hero’s narrative. In Whyte’s interpretation, vultures descend on Prometheus, instead of the archetypal eagle – as in Peter Paul Rubens’ 17th century painting of the same name. With this modification Whyte comments on contemporary society’s disposition towards Black culture while simultaneously vilifying its creators, and challenges dominant social attitudes to Black masculinity with works that reappraise his relationship to his own body, both corporeally and politically.
While theatre has always played a central role in Whyte’s work, his new paintings assume a more cinematic approach to storytelling. Visually dynamic compositions painted at scale play with perspective, conjuring panoramic angles that blur the divide between audience and subject. In Blackbirds singing in the dead of night a band of naked men dance around a bonfire, engulfed in clouds of smoke. Observed from a low angle, the viewer is catapulted into their midst. Whyte imagines each of his works as a vignette – blink, and the scene changes. In Snow Country, for example, a group is frozen in motion as they run through a wintry forest, the skeletal trees a spectral riposte to the fullness of each hastening figure. As in all the artist’s works, ambiguity strikes, and it is for the viewer to decide whether the scene is one of play or pursuit.
Free
Opening Hours
Mon-Fri 10am-6pm, Sat 11am-6pm
Location:
6 Heddon Street
London, W1B 4BT
Copyright text and images the gallery and the artist