Adam Pendleton’s work indexes and documents the physical process of painting to create layered pictorial fields that—in their painterly, psychic, and verbal expressions—announce a new mode of visual composition for the 21st century.

He is guided by a visual and structural philosophy he has termed “Black Dada,” an ongoing inquiry into Blackness and its relationship to abstraction and conceptions of the avant-garde. Investigating Blackness as a color and theoretical proposition, the artist’s work reflects a contrapuntal understanding of the world in both sensorial and conceptual terms.

In his current show at Pace Gallery New York, An Abstraction, Pendleton’s 12 paintings and 13 drawings hang within a monumental, site-specific architecture consisting of five black triangular forms. These sculptural walls reorder the gallery into new, unexpected spaces and extend the visual language of the exhibited works.

“How do you make sense, on an emotional, intellectual, and pragmatic level, of the visual residue one leaves behind?”, Pendleton asks. His works capture a microhistory of marks and impressions: drips, splatters, strokes, erasures, shapes, word fragments. These are the accumulated remnants left over from work undertaken in his painting studio, remnants that have been composited to create richly textured visual fields.

His textures run dense. Layered marks and sprays are dispersed all over. Blacks and whites range from the lightly translucent to the deeply opaque. Other works reformat the same source material, shifting in scale and focus. The tonal contrast is dramatically reduced—black on black—and the cropping is often tighter and closer, highlighting smaller moments.

Pendleton has described his paintings as an inquiry into the composition of subjectivity from the visual residue one leaves behind; indeed, in both the paintings and the drawings, “minor moments become major moments because of how they articulate who we are or who we might be at any given moment. It’s a visual poetics of disruption.”

The artist frequently cites counterpoint as a signature of his work, referring to the kind of musical composition in which multiple simultaneous voices are organized with an emphasis on horizontal movement instead of strictly vertical synchronization.

To the degree that each of the works is organized, contrapuntal lines form interference patterns and parallaxes. Similarly, the day-to-day remains of a studio practice are visible here only in their continuous displacement, passing through various modes and mechanisms of abstraction. The work asks us to examine these modes and mechanisms more closely, to notice the ways in which they configure and reconfigure our attention and intentions.

“AN ABSTRACTION”
ADAM PENDLETON
PACE GALLERY
NEW YORK