” We are not — or “we are not.” These words, which resonate like a cry, like a call to change our behavior and our perceptions, open the all-black-and-white exhibition that the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) will dedicate starting Thursday to Adam Pendleton. They are to be read, a thousand times rather than once, in four huge tables.
This cry, the artist from Virginia has made his leitmotif since 2008, the year he wrote a manifesto entitled black dada. The text proposes a series of declarations or affirmations, in the negative, to refuse the labels attached to the Afro-American community.
“We are not what they say we are”, says this rising figure of conceptual art, passing through town, thus underlining the tension between what is legitimate and what is not, between what is visible and what is not.
“We are all part of this, consciously or not, voluntarily or against our will,” he said in an interview. The exhibition, whose subtitle aptly states “what we did together”, brings together series of paintings and drawings, as well as a video.
38-year-old Adam Pendleton is having quite the year. In New York, the exhibition has just ended, which allowed him to occupy the hall of the MoMA, as no other had done. His presence in Montreal marks his first solo in Canada, the content of which is not that of the MoMA. And in April, back in New York, he will be at the long-awaited Whitney Biennial, an event known for showcasing the most promising artists.
Humanity as the denominator
Between abstraction and representation, between an almost mechanical repetition and an uncontrollable gestural expression, his works on canvas and on paper respond to each other in an incessant dialogue. The artist entrusts them with working on them simultaneously, according to “a back and forth between drawing and painting”.
His “open and indefinite” approach is also evident in the choice of black and white. “The limit of the palette becomes a concept, a material possibility. I like to think of black as the sum of all colors. It’s interesting that one color can represent all the others. The White ? It’s just another color. »
The huge Untitled (WE ARE NOT), produced in 2021 and 2022, draw on the principle of deceptive appearances. Not only is Adam Pendleton keen to present each as a collection of small segments, rather than an unalterable whole, but they are not a copy of each other.
“They are both different and similar,” he says. I use the same materials, but they are different. They talk about humanity. We humans are made of the same materials, but we are all different. »
“Better for whom, better in what? »
Humanist and unifier, without home base in a single gallery — since 2020, he has exhibited in eight different brands — the multidisciplinary creator is associated with an Afro-American movement if only because, from his black dadahe claimed to be of the lineage of the Black Artists Movement of the 1960s and its founder, Amiri Baraka.
Eric Garner. Michael Brown. John CrawfordIII. Tanisha Anderson. Tamir Rice. All these individuals, who died in 2014 during police interventions, come to the surface in the video exhibited at the MMFA. This one, Just Back From Los Angeles. A Portrait of Yvonne Rainer(2015-2016), unites the words of activists like Malcolm X with the voice and gestures of the famous choreographer.
“The video speaks of a kind of racial injustice, admits its author, but also of memory, of how things are perceived and understood over time. Yes, part of the text evokes these extrajudicial murders, but also other memories. »
“Do we have to wonder if things are better? Better for whom, better in what? he asks again. There are tangible ways to understand if things are improving. But “better”, in general, is an abstract thing. »
“What I wanted to address, he concludes with regard to both the video and the exhibition, is that nothing is ever simple. Even Yvonne’s body language [Rainer] is not. Life and things are complex. »