Transcript

ABRAM JACKSON: The powerful use of light here draws our attention to this man’s lowered eyelids and clasped hands, making us feel we’re in the presence of intense suffering, or prayer.

CLAUDIA SCHMUCKLI: Wiley employs a piercing brightness that bathes the body in aura of sacredness, and it echoes the treatment of the divine in European painting, which has its origins in the veneration of the body of Christ.

KEHINDE WILEY: There's an important part of religious depictions of ecstasy in relationship to human suffering. So much of this is pictured through light, in a way that almost feels erotic - the sense in which the body is prone and flooded fully with this kind of divinity, this rapturous presence.

ABRAM JACKSON: Wiley looked to another kind of Christian imagery for this figure’s pose – a sculpture of a Roman boy named Tarcisius, who was killed for his faith. Both the original sculpture and this painting work to create emotion and reverence in the viewer. The parallels with the oppression of young Black men in this country are inescapable.

KEHINDE WILEY: I think that is, at its core, the central metaphor of this work: this conflict between the humanity of this subject and the brutal fact of human nature. This desire to be seen as present and fully formed, but also having been stricken down and now depicted as lost potential, as evidence of the sacred, as evidence of something beautiful that could have been.

ABRAM JACKSON: Our next audio stop is the bronze sculpture to your left – of a man lying in a wooden case.

Image: Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977), “Christian Martyr Tarcisius (El Hadji Malick Gueye),” 2022. Oil on canvas, 72 5/8 x 107 3/4 in. (184.5 x 273.7 cm), Framed: 83 11/16 x 118 3/4 x 3 15/16 in. (212.5 x 301.7 x 10 cm). © Kehinde Wiley. Courtesy of Galerie Templon, Paris. Photo: Ugo Carmeni