WITHOUT A COAST
The painting of Darryl Keith Babatunde Smith or ΔΚΒΣ, in the Greek version of his name and personality, seems to be defined by the many aspects of time. Smith studies languages in order to traverse the time between his own time and the texts of the art he loves. The multilingual titles of his works refer not only to various chapters of mythology and culture, but also to a peculiar bridging between ancient languages and his own, contemporary English. Even the material that he mostly uses – silverpoint, goldpoint or bronzepoint – has passed through centuries from the Northern Renaissance until today. Like the pages from the time of a journal, each of his works is, to him, the encoded memory of a personal moment that has been immersed in ancient Greek sculpture and the myths that birthed it. Between that past and the present, the body stands silent, his own body, depicted in ancient positions that approach painting through the ways of sculpture.
Smith employs posing and the distance of his photographic depic- tion, engaging both the eye and the mind in the creative process. He begins painting, always, on a large sheet of paper, whose final dimensions, however, are imposed by the work that results and not the other way round, to reject any predetermined frame of creation and deem the blank space of the paper a part of the composition. First with goldpoint and then silverpoint for the darker areas, he weaves his figures in subtle but exceptionally accurate lines, gently touch- ing the thin mineral paper. The gentleness of his technique characterizes the soft outlines that seem to glow with an internal light, and that visual tenderness almost becomes the subject of his drawings. What is, essentially, embedded in these works is time – the time it took to make them, and the time it takes to view them.
Between the visible and the invisible, Smith’s figures often re- semble the unfinished, the non finito, emerging from the paper like the ephemeral traces of a mist blown by a breeze. His works become the place where a valuable and vulnerable line finds refuge from the violence of contemporary images. His opposition to the imposed time of others and the violence of speed is discernible, besides, in his subject matter. The “lysimeles” side of himself seems to passively resist the rhythms of contemporary reality through the closed eyes of insight and dreaming. And yet, even though his sleeping or recumbent figures allude to the inertia of sleep through well-known sculptures of antiquity, their fragmentary bodies sometimes become wounded torsos because they bear the image of a current amputation, the violence of discontinuity.
That same violence seems to engulf the face of a self-Pentheus in stifling fur on the white of the paper, while the self is protected from another violence within the timeless helmet of an exotic bird. Just like the various works where Smith places his image within the aesthetic influences that have shaped him, the disguises of the self are bold contrasts be- tween the current reality and the reality of myth.
Covering its face with the blank space of paper, the clay color of black-figure pottery, or an expressionless mask, the Self comes into confrontation with the Other through yet another mask, but with a body that’s introverted, that doesn’t respond to the tension of the significant moment. If Darryl Keith Babatunde Smith makes vulnerable figures with his “whispered lines”, it is because in the Hellenistic sculptures he loves, he saw the courage of the non-ideal, the human passions and flaws. That body “without a coast”, an island-body, is more than the Parthenon’s Ilissos or Michelangelo’s River God; it is Smith himself, crossing time and land.
Elizabeth Plessa
Art historian, curator and editor