Ofili's Glittering Icons - work of Chris Ofili at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, New York

The intensely decorative paintings of Chris Ofili are informed by the vibrancy of black popular culture and the reality of British racism, aspects often overlooked in the controversy surrounding his work in "Sensation."

Chris Ofili's paintings are joyous things to behold. Dotted with bright pastel colors, layered with shiny varnish, sprinkled with glitter, their surfaces seem to dance and dazzle and shimmer and shine. Some even glow in the dark. Complex, decorative and mostly figurative, they are populated with an ever-increasing cast of characters, both real and imaginary. And, oh yes, they are often presented leaning against rather than hanging on the wall, supported on balls of varnished elephant dung, the way that over-stuffed armchairs used to rest on carved wood spheres.

Nothing in Ofili's paintings is there by chance. Two of their most distinguishing elements, the elephant dung and the colored dots, he began to use after making a six-week British Council-sponsored trip to Zimbabwe in 1992, when he was still a student at London's Royal College of Art. The dot technique was used by the artists who created the ancient cave paintings Ofili saw and admired in the Matopos hills. Ofili's use of dung began in Africa when, dissatisfied with the paintings he was making there, he picked up some dried cow dung and stuck it onto one of his canvases. When he returned to London he took some elephant dung with him and began to include it in his paintings as a counterpoint to his increasingly decorative surfaces. Elephant dung also turned up in several 1993 performance pieces he did in street markets in Berlin and the South London neighborhood of Brixton. For these works, he spread a piece of cloth on the ground, arranged balls of dung on it and posted a sign reading "Elephant Shit." The balls of dung were not actually for sale, but presenting them as if they were allowed Ofili to observe the reactions of passersby as they sized up this young black man apparently offering them exotic substances, like a witch doctor or drug dealer. Elephant dung (which the artist now obtains from the London Zoo) has come to play an integral role in the presentation of his paintings, both as support elements and as points of emphasis in the overall painterly scheme. The dung balls themselves are often adorned with map pins, arranged in abstract patterns or spelling out parts of the works' titles.

Ofili takes pleasure in rendering his paintings as visually rich as possible. "I try to make it [the painting] more and more beautiful, to decorate it and dress it up so that it is so irresistible, you just want to be in front of it," he told me in a telephone interview last summer. But viewers, seduced by the highly decorated surfaces into coming closer for a really good look, may then find themselves, as Ofili intends, seeing more than they bargained for. Most notoriously, the floating, seemingly abstract shapes which hover all around the full-length figure of The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) turn out to be small collaged cutouts from porn magazines, cropped to center on rear views of women's buttocks and genitals [see "Front Page," A.i.A., Nov. '99]. Here, Ofili brings one of Christian iconography's most sacred images into the closest proximity with contemporary commercial culture's everyday profanity. But he does not stop there. In contrast to traditional European painting (and with a nod, perhaps, to the vernacular tradition of the black Madonna), he shows Mary as black rather than white. Her right breast is exposed, represented by a single, strategically placed ball of elephant dung.

As a painter and as a Roman Catholic, Ofili has long been familiar with the image of the Virgin as both an artistic and a religious icon. As a young black male steeped in contemporary culture, he found it perfectly sensible to rework Mary as a black woman and to place her in juxtaposition with the contemporary discourse of pornography. In doing so, the artist chose to make explicit the sensual undertones which cannot be separated from any image of a beautiful young woman suckling her child. "I was going to the National Gallery and looking at van Eyck's paintings of mother and child," he explains in the catalogue for his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1998. "I just wanted the image of the breast, really. The exposed breast is hinting at motherhood but those images are very sexually charged." This may explain why Ofili left the child out of his picture--in order to put greater emphasis on the icon's sexuality. Mary's direct gaze seems to challenge the viewer to look at her bared breast. Her mouth, too, with its wide and luscious pink lips, seems to echo the sexual organs on view in the collaged photographs.

Ofili is something of a veteran where publicity is concerned. He was first exposed to the full glare of media attention when "Sensation" had its clamorous London debut at the Royal Academy in 1997 and The Holy Virgin Mary came in for its share of abuse. "Academy on the rack over `porn Virgin,'" one headline blared. The following year he was nominated for the Turner Prize, which involves the competing artists in a round of interviews, photo shoots and TV appearances; then Ofili won the Turner Prize and garnered further tabloid coverage, as well as critical attention, both pro and con. Next came the storm over "Sensation" in New York [see article, p. 53]. But media attention is not something Ofili seeks. His subjects are chosen not to court controversy but rather as his way of exploring themes drawn from his own life experience, his family history and his continuing study and practice of painting.