When I spoke to Somaya Critchlow in February, she had just moved into a new studio in South London facing the Thames. No paintings to see there yet; for now, she tells me, she’s just drawing as she enjoys the light coming in off the river. The not-yet-30-year-old painter had recently finished the work for her largest American show yet, which opened at the Flag Art Foundation in New York in April, comprising new paintings alongside a selection of highlights from her still-brief but already noteworthy career.
Speaking on Zoom, I asked Critchlow how she feels about being part of the new wave of figurative painting that’s swept the art world over the last few years, and her response was telling: She doesn’t deny that her work is figurative—how could she?—but she says her deep interest is not there so much as in the materials and techniques of painting. Can she really be such a formalist, or is she being evasive? After all, her fantasy portraits of young, bare-breasted Black women are not exactly neutral subjects: imagine something like a collaboration between Lynette Yiadom-Boakye and Lisa Yuskavage, but at a Giorgio Morandi scale. Drawn, in a far from literal way, from sources ranging from classical European painting and her own ongoing practice of life drawing to 1960s soft porn and contemporary music videos, and not-so-contemporary ones, too, like PJ Harvey’s “C’mon Billy” (1995), Critchlow’s works seem calculated to elicit strong reactions. They test viewers’ visceral feelings about female sexuality, Blackness, and what happens when they intersect. Things can get uneasy. She once told an interviewer that “with femininity you can’t get it right.” Her work reflects an equanimity with that conundrum.
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For what it’s worth, I’m willing to believe the smiling, ingenuous-looking young woman I see on the screen really is unconcerned about how others might react to her provocative images. She’s so clearly absorbed in her own self-exploration by way of the language of painting—not formalism, but form as a metaphor for the self. The critic Johanna Fateman once put it beautifully: Critchlow’s figures, she said, “seem to fix their dispassionate gazes beyond the sexualized tropes that frame them.” The results are often poignant, sometimes ironic, always honest in their willingness to go where the inherent and undemonstrative sensuality of her paint seems to lead.
The paintings exude an unmistakable intimacy. That’s partly to do with the modest size of most of her works: When she mentioned she’d done some bigger paintings for the New York show, I asked how large, curious about what sounded like a significant shift in the work, and she admitted, “well, medium-scale.” The intimacy owes perhaps as well to her muted palette, dominated by the myriad browns she uses to describe, not only her characters’ flesh, but much of their surroundings; above all, it derives from the delicacy of touch that she brings to the canvas. And although there is a surprising strain of traditionalism in her approach to painting, perhaps a reflection of her postgraduate training at London’s Royal Drawing School, she is no more constrained by any sort of academicism than she is tempted by the overt sociopolitical messaging that engages many of the other figurative painters in the spotlight today. Her art is finding out who she is and what she can do through painting.