Adam Pendleton’s solo show at Galerie Eva Presenhuber is as starkly monochrome as it’s possible to get, works, walls and floor seeped in brilliant white, grey tones and midnight black.
The use of deep, inky black makes a bold political statement too, mirrored in the choice of ‘Black Power’ as one of the only instantly legible phrases to puncture the sea of letters, little and large, that exist within the work. The show’s title, Midnight in America, further enforces these connotations, playing off Ronald Reagan’s ‘Morning in America’ election campaign in 1984. Are we currently facing something of an end of days? Of course, this is all the more relevant considering America’s recent political narrative, running alongside and meeting in many places with sobering conversations about race.
This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Zurich’s Galerie Eva Presenhuber, which combines six new paintings, two large-scale wall works and a selection of smaller works and collages. The paintings all hold a shared title, Untitled (A Victim of American Democracy), which sprung from collages that pull apart the title of Malcolm X’s speech ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ in 1964. There is a tussle between clean line and hand-formed expressive spray-painted stroke, the works holding elements of political posters and also weighty abstract paintings. Tension also is created in this use of spray paint.
In Pendleton’s own words, there’s: “something democratizing about spray paint—anyone can pick it up, you use it, you make a sign, there’s an immediacy, it is functional. There is an inherent value of the street and its aesthetic. I’m just blackening it. I make a black ground. It becomes the ground of the painting in a traditional sense.”
Other works also make use of famous slogans and texts, one of the large wall pieces using spreads from the artist’s own Black Dada Reader, which Pendleton uses to describe his practice. It’s an interesting combination, which is critical of abstraction and historical conceptualism in some manner, adding elements which confront their apparently elitist nature and history, but also employing some of the most successful aesthetic and formal elements to make a sincere statement about current political issues.
In these works, the Civil Rights Movement finds itself naturally aligned with the recent Black Lives Matter movement, and there is a definite shrinking together, a connecting of past and present which of course brings questions of the nature of progress. Rather than moving forwards, we find ourselves so often stuck in an infinite loop of opening and closing of attitudes. This show blurs the lines, chops up the words, and places the central and enduring issue right at the heart.
‘Midnight in America’ runs until 21 January 2017 at Galerie Eva Presenhuber. All images: Installation view, Midnight in America, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, 2016
