Ding dong dung

Went to see Chris Ofili at the Tate Britain, a mid-career retrospective of his painting career so far. The man who single-handedly increased the market value of elephant dung. I remember when Ofili's early work hit the headlines, saw the Turner Prize show in 1998. A trailblazer part of the YBA generation, but notably a YBBA (Young Black British Artist - Ofili is from Manchester with Nigerian parents) at a time in the 90s when there were very few black graduates from British art schools. He was 'the shit'. Those name-making early works were vividly coloured and patterned canvases presented standing on piles of elephant dung and included piles of dung glued to the surface.

Now what I didn't realise was that he milked the dung-wave dry for another 10 years or so. I can see what he was doing, tapping into raw materials of Africa, disrupting the picture surface with the incongruity, the assault against the other imagery - racial and sexual stereotypes in collage, bead-like application of shiny resin bright colours. Bling and dung. But I couldn't help feeling going through the array of his 90s work that his working practice must have become somewhat a tired gimmick, trapped by his own signature: right I've finished the painting, now where shall I stick the shit?

I was reminded of how with late Picasso's his actual signature got bigger as his efforts on the canvas got weaker. Buyers were paying for that signature, regardless of what else was in the frame.

It was interesting to see the evolution of Ofili's work post-dung. An interesting transition I thought was a series of green and red paintings where the dung pile protrusion was used pictorially - the dung over-painted and beaded placed to depict an elaborate beaming sun in scenes of African paradise. There was a maturity to this work; maybe when you've been an enfant terrible (and what terrible infant doesn't daub shit on any available surface), this is the next stage: first you make the shit ugly, then you make the shit beautiful to beguile people, then you leave the shit alone.

The Caribbean influence (Ofili has relocated to Trinidad) comes through in more recent dung-less paintings, also a Matisse influence comes into view. Glazes, darkness, and no protruding elephant dung. There is less audacity, less verve perhaps in the colours, less an obvious challenge, more atmospheric, more tuned into nature, climate and light, people and things half-seen in the twilight. Transferrring to Trinidad is bound to affect how you work, and it seems to me that these tall canvases aren't all completely successful, somehow not fully realised, but they are still seductive and mystical, self-seducing perhaps, as they again steer towards Afro-Caribbean stereotypes - a different time and place though, here perhaps of the colonialist kind, exotic, sexualised, by the mystical twilight quality of an outsider making home in the tropics.