Executed in 1988, Exu is one of the last recorded works by Jean -Michel Basquiat, who died prematurely in August that same year from an overdose of heroine at the age of 27. Alongside the eerily prophetic final painting Riding with Death, in Exu we see the artist's final self-representation that he left for posterity. Deceptively complex, in this expressively explosive painting he casts himself as the trickster deity Exu of the Yoruba religion indigenous to Nigeria and Benin which, at the time of the Middle Passage, became common to nascent Diasporic faiths in the Americas.  Like Hermes in Classical Antiquity and Saint Anthony in Catholicism, the African spirit – or orisha – Exu is the patron of boundaries and the travellers that cross them. Directing traffic along the road of life, he resides at the crossroads of fortune and is invoked when important decisions are taken.

Born to Puerto Rican and Haitian parents and brought up in the cultural melting pot of Brooklyn, Basquiat's art habitually draws on his heritage and its artistic legacy. On the one hand, his interest in primitive African art and mythology provided a necessary foil to the prevailing trend in America for chaste minimalist art; however, it also presented a vehicle through which he could address important themes of the history of the subjugation of his ancestors. This is made explicit in the titling of the present work and its bold presentation in block letters at the top of the composition. The original (anglicised) spelling is Esu in Nigeria, however it became Exu in Portuguese speaking Brazil when enslaved Africans brought their spiritual practices with them at the time of the Middle Passage. Here Basquiat emphasises the linguistic evolution of the word by drawing a box around the X and in doing so he alludes to the shared history of his ancestors. Similarly the cigarettes that litter the floor surrounding the figure are a standard offering to Exu, however they also reference the tobacco trade and European exploitation of enslaved Africans in the New World.

In Yoruba mythology Exu is also the god of chaos and in African folklore a trickster who disobeys codified rules and conventional behaviour. It is in this last respect that Basquiat most closely identified with the spirit. Rather like the Shakespearean intelligent fool, the trickster – a stock character of African American literature – often used his wits to outsmart his opponents and served as an example of how it is possible to overcome a system of oppression from within. The most famous of these characters is Br'er Rabbit in the Uncle Remus Stories endemic to the Southern United States, seen by many to represent the enslaved African who uses his wits to overcome the circumstances of his subjugation. In the 1980s, Basquiat was an outsider in a predominantly white art world. Throughout his oeuvre, Basquiat depicted himself as a celebration and embodiment of black power and a rebel against a post-colonial world. As an empowered black artist, he infiltrated and – by the time this picture was painted – dominated a New York art world which was formerly the reserve of white men. 

Most hauntingly, however, in African mythology Exu is also the personification of death, a psycho pomp whose responsibility it is to deliver newly deceased souls to the afterlife. In the present work, the manifestation of Exu closely resembles images of the Egyptian deity Anubis, the jackal-headed god holding a flail associated with the afterlife. Basquiat was familiar with Egyptian art and cultural symbolism from the collections of the Brooklyn Museum which captured his imagination as a youth. Here the proliferation of eyes, which swarm around the figure, recall Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Eye of Wedjat used in Ancient Egypt to decorate tombs and ward off evil spirits in the afterlife. While nobody, not even Basquiat himself, could have predicted his own imminent demise, it remains an enigma of his illustrious career that his final paintings should confront and prophecy his untimely death in such a seemingly candid way. Shortly after completing this work, he depicted himself astride a diabolic skeletal beast in the final painting Riding with Death.

Throughout his short career, Basquiat wilfully played with constructions of his own identity, drawing on multifarious cultural and spiritual belief systems, ancient and modern, to create his coterie of alter-egos. In the deity Exu he finds great affinity and in doing so he creates a multi-layered painting which interweaves African American histories with the story of his art world rebellion and ultimately a prescient vision of his own death.