Glenn Ligon

Acquired from the artist by the present owner

This work is in very good condition overall. There are minor scattered dust accretions. Unframed.
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In Glenn Ligon's oeuvre, the artist's use of black stenciled letters impressed onto a heavily worked, soot-like black ground obscures the viewer's ability to readily decipher the text. However, our aesthetic senses are engaged by the tactile surface of the raised letters that appear to hover above the surface of the flat, planar ground. The subtle gradients of onyx pigmentation allow passages of the text to appear like a whisper gracing our pupils.

The artist has said of this body of work:

I use a plastic letter stencil that has every letter of the alphabet
on it and the painting is made by doing each letter, one at a time, from the top of the painting to the bottom of the painting, and then when I reach the bottom, I start over again. The more I go over those letters with this oil stick, the blacker and denser the surface of the painting becomes, to the point where it is entirely blacked out. So the text is visible and not visible, legible and not legible in various degrees. The text still remains fragmentary, it's not the entire essay. It's not even possible to read an entire paragraph in the text. The struggle that you have to go through in reading the text in my painting adds something to the text.[1]

For Ligon's White #12, the artist appropriated words from the essay White authored by Richard Dyer which also address the obscuring nature of all-white and all-black depictions. The scholar argues that whiteness is difficult to comprehend since differences are not immediately evident. On the other hand Dyer postulates that dissimilarities in blackness are more readily apparent and thus easier to scrutinize.

Much like an early 1960s black Abstract Painting by Ad Reinhardt, Ligon's work challenges the viewer to read the surface of the dark pigmentation. One desperately wants to examine and comprehend each word in Ligon's work just as Reinhardt's black paintings challenge one's eyes to identify where the geometric parallelograms begin, end and overlap. What both artists achieve is, as Reinhardt stated, "pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless relationless, disinterested painting—an object that is self-conscious (no unconsciousness) ideal, transcendent, aware of no thing but art (absolutely no anti-art)."[2]

Moreover, as in the wall drawings of minimalist Sol LeWitt, each of Ligon's letters has a different sense of gravitas based the amount of pressure the artist's hand employed in making each gesture of the letter forms. Ligon much like LeWitt is acutely aware of how each oil stick mark made on the surface of the canvas is either three-dimensional or flat based on the artist's command over their medium. The serial quality of each line of Ligon's text echoes that of each mark made at the direction of the artist in the case of LeWitt. Finally, it is the overall affect of each letter formed or each line drawn that forms the holistic, cohesive composition.

[1] http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A6902&page_number=18&template_id=1&sort_order=1
[2] Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, New York: Viking Press, 1975, pp. 82-3.