Titus Kaphar: New Alters

Gagosian, London, 17 March - 15 May 2022

The show begins with a long paragraph-poem by Tochi Onyebuchi on the wall. Next to it is a statue of Jesus that has been wrapped in a painted canvas, effacing both sculptural surface and painted image in a single iconoclastic gesture. Further inside the gallery, the lights are dimmed and the paintings are glossy under spotlights. 

Skillfully, Kaphar paints large canvases reminiscent of the old master tradition, full of citations from art history. In one painting you can recognise the Black courtier from Benozzo Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi in Florence. In another is the ginger man doffing his cap from Bonjour Monsieur Courbet. Kaphar copies these paintings and cuts them out, crumples them up, places them next to photographs or wraps them around sculptures, to comment on the legacy of European culture in the US from a Black point of view. 

For example, in The Eye of Providence (cover image), the ginger man has been cut out and stuck against a watchful Black face, which is partially obscured by an ominous red shape. Beneath the face is a White baby, in the style of the engravings used on banknotes. This and other works in the exhibition bring to mind old forms of Black servitude - raising White children, for example - and their relationship with the mechanisms of capitalism. The paintings refuse to let art or religion off the hook as separate from these systems, bringing them into the picture. 

In Nothing to See Here, an orientalist-style Black man in an Arab headdress hoists up a classical canvas to reveal a black and white photograph of four gun-toting White cowboys, as if to pull up the curtain of European refinement to reveal the violence of American racism. 

Unfortunately, Kaphar's formula of collaging paintings next to photographs fails either to enlighten or to move the viewer, because they are all much too generalising and vague. There is a nod towards a certain idea of Western art history, a nod towards present-day and historical racism, but the work lacks the specificity to bring itself out of the abstract and make its message hit home.

The painted elements are pastiches, entirely subordinate to the concept, and not worth looking at for their own merit. The concept itself fails because it lacks any personal spark, any particularity to ignite the drama. All the stage lights in the world would not compensate for this.