The New York Review of Books, essay by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
2018
"Since he moved to Trinidad, Chris Ofili has absorbed the prismatic colors of the tropics—you can’t not here. But he determined not to traffic, in his work, in the noontime brightness that is its own kind of Caribbean cliché. His most potent works dwell in the blue-black hues of the twelve hours per day when the bougainvillea and creepers are cloaked in dark. Something else that’s caught his eye here are two kinds of cages. One of these is the kind that holds birds—the wire abodes that house Macaws and Picoplats and, especially, rust-bellied finches that adorn porches and whose cages you can see men in sandals toting down the road at dusk. The other kind is meant to contain humans. It’s the form of cage that people have fashioned from and around their homes."
Published in Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost, a new catalogue from David Zwirner Books, this essay by the critically acclaimed author of Island People: The Caribbean and the World (2016) charts the history of chain-link fences. Focusing on a selection of the photographs that helped inspire Ofili's solo exhibition Paradise Lost at David Zwirner, New York in the fall of 2017, Jelly-Schapiro goes on to explore what this imagery tells us about Trinidad in particular and the Caribbean as a whole. These two essays—one visual, the other literary—open onto a whole new set of interpretive possibilities for this groundbreaking artist.
Read the full essay in The New York Review of Books. Chris Ofili: Paradise Lost is available from David Zwirner Books.