At first, Chris Ofili’s Requiem came as a shock. I am well used to the languid, dreamlike qualities Ofili’s art nowadays presents us with: the distortions, the profuse vegetation, the swooning elongations, the ravishing cascades of corpuscular light, the satyrs and the lovers and the night. What stopped me today on the staircase at Tate Britain, whose surrounding walls his painting occupies, was the uneasy collision of idiom and subject matter, and all completed on such an ambitious scale.
In Requiem, there are references to the early Italian Renaissance and to classical myth, to the Babylon of Rastafarian belief, to unseen dimensions and to a kind of paradise. The rising waters in Requiem can be read both as an ocean of tears, and as the waters of Venice – where Ofili met the young Gambian British artist Khadija Saye for the first and last time in 2017, shortly before she and her mother died in the Grenfell Tower fire.
