THE HUMOR THAT CHARACTERIZES KERRY JAMES MARSHALL'S PAINTINGS IS, IF ONE NOTICES, RELATED TO ABSURD SITUATIONS REVEALED THROUGH DIFFERENT MODES OF DEPICTING BLACK PEOPLE, THROUGH DUBIOUS AND DISCONNECTED LINKS. ON AN INTENSE EMOTIONAL PLANE, UTILIZING ALL THE POSSIBILITIES OF TRADITIONAL REPRESENTATION, HE REQUIRES HUMOR'S NATURALIZING AND LIGHTENING EFFECT AT THE MOMENT HE REACHES A DEEP AND DARK REALISM. IN SUCH AN ENVIRONMENT, THROUGH COMPLEX AND EXAGGERATED FICTIONS, HE WISHES TO EVALUATE BLACK IDENTITY AND CULTURE IN THE CONTEXT OF GENDER, RACE, AND EQUAL RIGHTS

a poignant critical language

The humor that characterizes Kerry James Marshall’s paintings is, if one notices, related to absurd situations revealed through different modes of depicting Black people, through dubious and disconnected links. On an intense emotional plane, utilizing all the possibilities of traditional representation, he requires humor’s naturalizing and lightening effect at the moment he reaches a deep and dark realism. In such an environment, through complex and exaggerated fictions, he wishes to evaluate Black identity and culture in the context of gender, race, and equal rights. Furthermore, this painting practice, realized through stimulating emphases, quickly deviates from its natural flow and, so to speak, transforms into an experience of liberation, presenting these special, effective, and poignant images articulated to the history of visual culture.

Additionally, this pictorial practice structured within image diversity arrives at a divergent resolution within a reduction that proposes a different aesthetic perception through simultaneous and fragmented structural connections, supported by writing and transferred photographic images. Here, the dark dimension into which meticulous and direct transmission evolves in every situation is, as it were, the product of a shadowing technique, metaphorically pointing to the tragic loneliness of a panorama filled with Blacks. Thus Marshall’s effort is full of emphases on the virtue of commitment to a culture and of perpetuating or sustaining it. And it can be characterized as an exceptional state that gains meaning and reality through human stories.

Marshall, who re-emphasizes cultural and social dynamics along with historical origin and past connections, in this aspect presents painting and time as an extraordinary dimension with a new, continuous, and pleasurable flow by bending them with content weight. Consequently, this depiction shakes the viewer through a poignant critical language, carrying the irony reached by a detailed and observational attitude to a searing and harsh level. For instance, despite the vacant, anxious, and uneasy expression reflected in nearly every figure’s posture or face, the quality their body displays in its own private space is extremely significant in revealing the biopolitical background of many such contradictions. Marshall therefore continues to address all the meaning possibilities of a jarring history nourished by the culture produced by an othered life and the traumas it carries forward, as it were, within a disturbing lightness.