Chris Ofili is still fearless after all these years. His current stunning gallery-filling exhibition "Paradise Lost," at David Zwirner through October 21, consists of just four paintings. The visual range here is narrow, austere, systemized. Each canvas is rendered in black-and-white patterns of little shapes, some of whichconvert into recognizable forms. Words appearing three times. Each of the paintings is slightly larger than life-sized, flat, not messy, loosely abstract, and look like a graphic combination of stained glass, dish towels, mystic dotted Australian dream paintings, and nonrepresentational movie posters. All four paintings are hung inside a large square of floor-to-ceiling cyclone-fencing cage — facing inward. Meaning viewers must take up positions on the either side of the gallery and look through the fence to see the work at all. There are only a few feet between the fence and walls. Yet the gestalt of "Paradise Lost" exudes a metaphysical geography of philosophy and otherness.
The walls are decorated with a race of giant, ghostly, semi-naked exotic gods gazing at us from behind another painted cyclone fence. They dance, commune with one another or look at us with tenderness, all enveloped in some earthly paradise. We feel an ethos of compassion in this limbo between the paintings and the walls. I felt taken out of myself and into some trans-historical cloister where invisible forces manifest themselves. For me "Paradise Lost"is Ofili creating his own conceptual, eroticized, blacker, and less glowingly Buddhist Rothko Chapel.