In Defense of Symbolic Value: Artistic Procedures in the Resort

One of the most respected painters today, Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) constantly questions the methods and means of painting to raise a sense of awareness of the medium, which he aims to reinvent and to reshape, always in opposition to traditional hierarchies. Albert Oehlen has been continually colliding various styles, orders or mediums since the 80’s, expanding the notion of painting to ‘what he wants to see’.

‘Albert Oehlen long ago constructed the possibility of his own painting. Yet at the beginning the road seemed not merely a narrow alley, it looked like a dead end. What then? Give up and turn back? Or take a hammer and drive a tunnel through the solid amorphous mass before him? Albert Oehlen was one of the very few to take up that hammer. And when he started he struck mighty blows. It was in materials, expression, history and genre – in everything his immediate predecessors had progressively demolished with their hammers – that Oehlen stated his determination not to give in. His possibility of painting had to be built from the foundations. No gratuitous transgressions, no irony or cynicism – even if it is true that some used these terms to disparage his efforts to be free of artistic propriety. Instead Oehlen went looking where nobody else did, plunging into the piles of detritus abandoned by the wayside of an era. Then a final task remained: that of interweaving painting as history with the position of the painter and with the society out of which both painting and painter emerge in order to reflect on it.’

A. Pontégnie, The history of abstraction seemed to be finished in Albert Oehlen, Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011

Adam Pendleton’s work is a reflection of how we increasingly move through and experience the world on a sensorial level – a form of abstraction that, in its painterly, psychic and verbal expression, announces a new mode of visual composition for the twenty-first century. It investigates Blackness as a colour, an identity, a method and a political subject – in short, as a multitude. His work also poses questions about the legacy of modernism in the present day, reactivating ideas from historic avant-gardes across mediums and moments in time. Since 2008, Pendleton has articulated much of his work through the frame of Black Dada, an evolving enquiry into the relationships between Blackness, abstraction and the avant-garde. It’s a visual philosophy that confounds the distinctions between legibility and abstraction, past and present, familiar and strange, reminding us that meaning always develops through difference.

‘This desire for fragmentation, which Pendleton situates in the formal logics of painting techniques, insists upon far more than the figure-ground spatial relation of the medium. Rather, he is positing the potential of painting through a repeated layering of the self […] represented in this instance through the mode of communication by which something we call the self is expressed in the world: language. Its resistance to legibility, its deference to an existence in a different register, tone, and level, results in a poetic observation that wavers in the streaks and marks imprinted in Pendleton’s hand on the work and in the blabbering, stuttering, disappearing words that question how abstraction functions and how the fragment acts upon the whole.’

A. Edwards ‘Adam Pendleton: Here Is Your Language’, in Adam Pendleton, Berlin: Phaidon, 2020, p. 62