Terence Nance 2012

Kehinde Wiley painted this portrait of Terence Nance, probably in oil, with a tight realism set against a decorative background. The background is a flat plane of black, animated by brightly colored flowers. Look at how the foregrounded figure is embedded in this field of artifice. Notice how the artist has extended the floral motifs onto the surface of the figure’s green cardigan. It’s as if the painting is flirting with the idea of flatness, but at the last minute the figure pushes forward, breaking the pictorial plane. Wiley here is in conversation with artists like David Hockney and Barkley L. Hendricks, both of whom collapse foreground and background, representation and abstraction. This painting isn’t trying to trick you; it’s laying bare the mechanics of painting, and how the material act of arranging colors can create a compelling fiction.