Victoria Miro Showcases Chris Ofili’s Glorious Ambiguity
Upon entering Victoria Miro, where Chris Ofili presents his newest exhibition Seven Deadly Sins, we first see ten A4 etchings of liquid ethereal women and plants that burst with spores on unique rose-pink, grey and white Suminagashi prints on Japanese marbled paper. The series Pink Daydreams of a Faun form an accompanying exhibition only nominally separated from the main body of work on view. They were inspired by the Symbolist poem L’après midi d’un nymph by late 19th century French writer Stephane Mellarmé and seem to align aesthetically and somewhat thematically with the paintings that follow.
The work then quickly expands in scale as we enter into Seven Deadly Sins proper. Set in the lower gallery, four very large two-by-three-meter oil paint and charcoal paradise scenes dominate the walls. They continue the psychedelic dream already established by the etchings in the previous room… The Swing shows a cloven-hooved faun lounging in a paradisiacal realm. The Great Beauty foregrounds a wild landscape of plants and animals. In The Fountain, a chalice spews forth dancing figures. And The Crowning shows the horned head of a faun being decorated with a cactus-like crown.
The upper gallery showcases several more works that are the same size as paintings in the lower gallery. Taken together, they succeed in feeling like a climax—particularly The Fall from Grace, which is the most clearly biblical of Ofili’s works and visually, the most powerful. At the top of the canvas, a round ochre sun with multicolored dots radiating outwards shines on abstract horned figures free-falling from the light.
The series of paintings, completed by Ofili over a seven-year period (2017-2023), are immediately striking for both their scale and use of color. Most of his works utilize the color wheel to dramatic effect: oranges against blues, pinks against greens. Ofili employs a sort of loose pointillism that feels almost microbial, as if the works depict scenes seen under a microscope. There is a feeling of time and power, of the primordial soup, of origin stories. Whilst there is clearly narrative in each of the paintings, there is an overall ambiguousness to Seven Deadly Sins. There is no clear sin attributed to any one painting, nor any obvious plotline that unfolds through their ordering. They are abstract musings, a verdant mess of mythological creatures and tropical scenes.
It’s clear that Ofili wants the paintings to act as a jumping off point for a wider conversation around sin. This is why his offering is so verbose. There is not only the exhibition text produced by the gallery but also the Mallarmé poem and two books accompanying the exhibition. The first book on offer is Chris Ofili: Pink Daydreams of a Faun, which pairs prints of the artist’s etchings with an essay by Minna Moore Ede. The second book compiles the contributions of seven writers—Hilton Als, Marlon James and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye among them—who provide their reflections on sin.
Als seems to be addressing the exhibition’s ambiguity directly when he writes: “our sins are often as unclear as our nicer motivations, often they’re jumbled together, a ball of spores.” This feels like an accurate read of Ofili’s paintings where sin is left undefined—a question more than anything else. Where does pleasure end and sin begin? The boundary is surely a fuzzy one and one that dances like microbes under a glass.
The Seven Deadly Sins is on view at Victoria Miro through July 29.