Kehinde Wiley Baroque Artist

Kehinde Wiley's Santos-Dumont -- The Father of Aviation II from "The World Stage: Brazil" series (2009) is a work of Baroque art in the sense that it expresses a dramatic scene that invites the viewer to participate in it. The eyes of the central subjects, for instance, gaze out at the viewer as though the viewer were the actual subject of the painting rather than the two dead black men whose eyes are fixed at the public.

In this sense, the painting is a throwback to works like those of Rembrandt, the Dutch Baroque painter, who often included characters in his paintings whose eyes were turned towards the viewer as though the viewer were interrupting some important action by approaching the canvas. Baroque art grew out of the Catholic Church's response to the rise of Protestantism and wanted to emphasize a naturalistic and realistic point in realistic arts (Johnson 178).

It also wanted to showcase dramatic works that emphasized the actual nature of mankind -- that it was fallen rather than born without the stain of Original Sin. Thus Baroque works typically highlighted the human rather than the ideal and the dramatic interplay through light or action of reality and the human consciousness (Wolfe 67). This interplay is evident in Kehinde Wiley's painting, which depicts the effects of war on the black race -- an effect often overlooked in the social consciousness, which is more typically elitist.

The realism of the painting is evident in the way in which the bodies lie prostrated on the ground as though cut down in the prime of life. Limbs are twisted and the bodies themselves lay like a dumped sack of potatoes on the crumbling rock. The faces of the bodies are turned towards the viewer in an expression of irony: they seem to be saying, "Did you think we went unaffected?" It is not quite an accusing expression, but it certainly does question one's attitude about the situation.

The painting appeals to the emotions of the viewer because it is a picture of two men lying dead on a foundation in ruins. Yet the dead men stare at the viewer as though reaching out to them from beyond the grave, inviting the viewer to do something to stop the madness. The emotions the viewer experiences are a strong sense of urgency and of guilt. The viewer wants to help, wants to step back in time and save the people, but the viewer also feels something like helplessness.

How can he do anything to save anyone? The story behind Wiley's painting is that it takes persons from history and puts them in contemporary fashions to make them appear more immediate, more familiar to us. According to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Wiley's "point may be that young black men have rarely been depicted in such historically charged visual language" ("Afro-Brazilian Baroque"). The men depicted in the painting are real men from Rio de Janeiro.