Chris Ofili - Weaving Magic, exhibition review: Lots of charm with no convincing centre

Weaving Magic is a show based on a tapestry created by professional weavers using a watercolour by Chris Ofili as a template. It also includes his supporting sketches, shown on their own next to the main space.

The final watercolour, titled The Caged Bird Sings (paraphrasing Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), is only a couple of feet wide, whereas the tapestry is several yards across. It is displayed in the National’s Sunley Room, a high-walled large square space. There is nothing else in there except a painted mural (in greys) that covers every inch of the available wall surface from floor to ceiling.

The show is a bit boring in terms of Ofili’s career as a whole, though there is some interest in seeing visual ideas developed in different stages. The imagery of the mural (executed by set painters overseen by Ofili and based on drawings supplied by him) is quite funny. Sexy giant gods, nude and semi-nude, who often seem to be transgender (figures with moustaches and beards and hairy chests, but also voluptuous hips, tiny waists and globe-like breasts) sway and lie around in a leafy setting.

The tapestry was woven in Edinburgh at the Dovecot Studio, and took two-and-a-half years to complete. It was commissioned by the Clothworkers’ Company, a Livery company founded 500 years ago in the City of London for the purpose of promoting the craft of cloth-finishing. When the National’s exhibition finishes the tapestry will be housed permanently in the company’s dining room.

The trouble is it follows Ofili’s watercolour a bit too slavishly, so it looks radiant from a distance but close-up has no visual identity of its own. There is no sense of one medium answering another with its own visual logic, just a photo-like imitation that lets them both down.

An air of pointlessness extends to the whole display: a lot of charm with no convincing centre. It is a shame to be disappointed by the weavers’ labour, and indeed the obvious sincerity of everyone involved in this project. But artistically there is very little to sing about.

Ofili’s imagery is a play on mythical landscapes, with lounging gods entertaining themselves, as seen often in western painting. Titian, for example, specialised in painterly transcriptions of Ovid’s poetry. He conjured up sensuous imagery but the literary context made it respectable. When the National Gallery showed some of these Titians a few years ago Ofili was invited to respond to them, and the current exhibition is an extension of that strategy.

He transposes classicism to a jungle setting. A god in the sky pours a cocktail down for two lovers in a glade. One of them plays a guitar. A female deity draws open some drapery revealing the central scene and on the opposite side a male holds a caged songbird. The murals suggest a vague mixture of Indian temple frescos, Gauguin’s Tahitian paradises, and Pop artist Alan Jones’s sexy cocktail parties.

The weavers (there were five of them working side by side) reproduce Ofili’s charcoal marks in microscopic detail. All their changeable fuzzy-edged character is retained as they playfully summon up imagery like a doodle looking for meaning. Drapery, hills, the ocean, all appear, as well as twirly lines that double as palm trees and a magic aura radiating from the flying cocktail waiter serving the musical lovers below, with fizzy bubbles popping in the air.

The sketches show Ofili developing the imagery of lovers and the waiter, the latter taken from a photo of the footballer, Mario Balotelli. (Ofili appears to identify with him, interested in both his talent and his struggles as a black footballer with Italian nationality.)

Because the scrawled letters COCKTAIL are repeated several times in different try-outs, they start to suggest a double meaning, especially given the eroticism of Ofili’s visual paradise: a certain type of tale perhaps? A cut-out photo of Balotelli’s head is stapled to the paper and in this rather harsh use of materials lies a glimmer of the surprising richness Ofili was able to bring to his work of the 1990s, in which roughness was made exciting and part of a sophisticated play of visual textures.

It has been many years since his aesthetic altered. From the early 2000s he moved away from shocking audiences, and replaced iconoclastic imagery of gangsters and bitches — with a startling accompaniment of lumps of real elephant dung from London Zoo (hygienically coated in resin) stuck to the canvas — with a dreamy symbolism of black deities and animal gods.

In some shows recently he has seemed to be experimenting with a revived decorative art from the Vienna Secession. Previously he really was on the level of the best Gustav Klimts but he also had modern relevant meaning. He explored femininity and race in an uncomfortable and funny way. All that has temporarily receded.

There is no reason why an essentially decorative kind of art shouldn’t have as much depth as a kind in which scorching commentary is also an element. But it remains to be seen if Ofili really can make an immediately pleasing softness possess the visual intensity he used to bring to his old style, where radiant beauty was combined with obscenity.

Chris Ofili: Weaving Magic is at the National Gallery, WC2 until Aug 28; nationalgallery.org.uk