The Brooklyn Rail

The title of Henry Taylor’s first major exhibition in France, installed in a neoclassical townhouse near the Champs-Elysées, doesn’t go unnoticed. The expression, which comes from Taylor’s mother’s lexicon, turns heads along with the rich colors of his beautifully rendered, loose paintings on view in the newest outpost of Hauser & Wirth, located in an enclave in the 8th arrondissement that has been historically associated with French luxury but has also a reputation for being “stuffy.”

Taylor, a force within the Los Angeles art scene for decades, is still little known to Parisian audiences, despite some recent exposure. Pharrell Williams collaborated with the artist, embroidering his portraits on a menswear collection he created for Louis Vuitton this past spring, and Kendrick Lamar projected his paintings at a music festival last summer. The current Paris show, in parallel with a major career survey at the Whitney in New York City, offers audiences in the French capital a taste of Taylor’s portraits articulating the complexity of African American history.

Here, assemblages made with toilet paper rolls, milk, detergent bottles, wood, and other miscellaneous items function as visual metaphors of Taylor’s work mode, or “hunting and gathering,” as he has put it: a voracious, highly intuitive sourcing and “devouring” of multiple references drawn from history, popular culture, and personal experience. This myriad of subjects, imagery, materials and art historical tropes creates his distinctive take on contemporary life and art itself.

Allusions to France’s art history and its storied collections of art are abundant (Taylor kept a studio practice in Paris during the summer, making frequent trips to local museums). There’s an imposing portrait of Michelle Obama in black wings that struck me as a contemporary Winged Victory of Samothrace and a naked Josephine Baker kneeling in front of two encyclopedic museums—the Louvre and the British Museum— alongside a caravel. The title of this latter work, got, get, gone, but don’t you think you should give it back? (2023) nods to debates of colonial reparation, looting, and repatriation. The most memorable painting of this set is Forest fever ain’t nothing like, “Jungle Fever” (2023). A Tribute to Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), it depicts Black people at leisure, men and women bare-chested. Taylor adds his own commentary: a soccer ball and a jersey of Kylian Mbappé, the Black, first-generation star of the French national soccer team, who hails from the suburbs of Paris and has been vocal about the racism he encounters in the sport. Americans and the French may have different views on race and identity, but the end result, both here and there, is marginalization, Taylor seems to observe.

The ability to find people, in the street or elsewhere, and decipher them in paint with a genuine streak of empathy is a great part of Taylor’s appeal. Loose, fast brushstrokes capture fleeting moments in a painting aptly titled Stand there, don’t move, it’ll be quick (2023), which pairs with its setting: the walls, ceiling, and underside of a historical staircase adorned with the gold and black stripes of Martin Creed’s Work No. 3839 (2023). Elegantly hung salon-style, a collection of portraits shows the range of Taylor’s gesture, which goes from studied expression to quick and sketchy, as well as the diverse stances and moods of his sitters, oscillating between formal and somewhat tense to relaxed, almost unware of the action of painting, like they were engaging in conversation with a friend.

Another highlight is No Atou (2023), a self-portrait of the artist, on his birthday in his studio in the French capital, which captures the feelings experienced that day: sadness, boredom, and apathy. Completing the composition are passages of flat, saturated color, as well as a painting of the artist’s daughter and an inscription of the Tahitian slang phrase “no atou,” a reference borrowed from a Paul Gaugin book in which the expression is glossed as “I don’t care.” Taylor’s birthday cake, rendered in hues of yellow, orange, blue, and green, has an eye-catching quality that is reminiscent of Wayne Thiebaud, with thick swathes of impasto rising off the canvas to mimic fresh icing.

Emotional, rich in color and metaphor, Taylor’s works weave seemingly idiosyncratic references to uncover the breadth of the human experience—both prosaic and extraordinary, all at once.