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Excerpt Dan Howard-Birt (Some Notes on Looking - Part 1)
The looking found in Kofi Boamah's After Rubens' Susanna and the Elders (2025) is a lecherous, desirous, threatening looking. This story of two men in high standing abusing their position of power to gain sexual favours is the subject of countless canvases in the Western painting tradition. In Kofi's interpretation the elder' lusty eyeballing hase become embodied, manifesting as chomping mouths, and pawing outstretched hands. The victim of this attack returns their gaze, but this time with a bitterness of equal severity. Lust and desire, envy and jealousy are commonly weighed in the scales of public morality and found wanting—something to be chastised or expunged. And yet, they are ways of looking that we find ourselves tangled -up in at some point on most days. As Rosanna McLaughlin wrote about John Currin in 2022: 'By letting his twisted libido out of the basement and into the light, his paintings express something of what it is to be human. As a consequence, they connect with a quality once sought-after by painters and latterly much neglected: spirit. A sick spirit, undoubtedly, but a spirit nonetheless.'