In general, there is a continuing expectation that paintings - some paintings at least - can act as repositories of an inexplicable kind of magic that can be found nowhere else.
What does one expect of a painting today? What does one expect of a painting? These are two very different questions, Even if at first g;lance they seem to be saying the same thing.
Painting is often presented, certainly by critics and curators, as a threatened form of artistic expression. There is a feeling that many committed professionals in the field of contemporary art would like to see it pushed aside altogether. Video, installations, conceptual work - all of these seem more in tune with the spirit of the times. Modern audiences, it is said, do not find painting easy to relate to, because they have been brought up on the cinema and television.Paintings are static, therefore dead.
There is also the fact that painting is essentially artisanal - by which I mean that it is conspicuously hand-made - and this seems at odds with a modern industrial society.
This is the kind of negative climate within which a committed painter such as Alexander Adams has to work.
There is also, however, another side to the coin, which is that paintings - often quite recent paintings rather than what we classify as Old Masters - have become some of the most conspicuous icons of unrestrained, unregulated capitalism. They are the place where money goes when the sums are almost too big to go anywhere else. The ownership of works by painters such as Picasso, Pollock and Jasper Johns has become one of the recognised symbols of private economic power.
In general, there is a continuing expectation that paintings - some paintings at least - can act as repositories of an inexplicable kind of magic that can be found nowhere else.
Alexander Adams would not, I think, lay claim to a position in the kind of super league that attracts the crowds to the big sales at Christie's and Sotheby's. His work does nevertheless raise a series of fascinating questions about the situation of painting today, not least because it is so restrained. What is one to make of a painter who completely eschews colour, when colour, and the control of colour, are one of the traditional hallmarks of painterly skill.
Adams remarks that, since the time he was a student, 'drawing and printmaking have been as important to me as painting'. He speaks of himself as an 'impure painter' as a result. Yet he also says, in apparent contradiction to this, that the fellow students at Goldsmiths College with whom he felt a real kinship were 'those who engaged seriously with painting, mainly abstract painting.'
One has to scrutinise his work carefully to realise the full paradoxical force of these remarks. The omitted element is that one of the major sources for his painting is clearly black-and-white photography.
Photography ha been a source for painters almost since it was invented. One of the best known examples is the relationship between Delacroix and Eugene Durieu, who prepared nude studies for Delacroix's use. Since that time, however, the relationship has often been a stormy one. At times painters have been happy to admit, and even to flaunt, their use of photographic source material. Examples are the Precisionists in America (Charles Sheeler, the most important member of the group was as skilled a photographer as he was a painter), and the Pop and Super Realist artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Among the leading Super Realists Chuck Close offers a particularly fascinating critique of the nature of photographic vision - of the way the lens sees as opposed to the way the eye sees.
Other painters have often been intent on concealing the extensive use they made of photographs. A recent instance is Francis Bacon, whose denial that he drew was apparently prompted by a desire to conceal the fact that the drawings he did undoubtedly make were made on top of photographs and magazine illustrations that he used as templates. The fib may have been prompted by the fact that Bacon was an artist without professional training who started his career as a painter at a moment when the most powerful critics of the day were deeply hostile to any apparent link between painting and photography.
Bacon is worth mentioning in this context because there seems to be a link between aspects of his work and that of Adams. Both, for example, are interested in the idea of Romantic horror. This is something which may be an inheritance from the work of the man who still seems the most ·'modern' of all the great Romantic artists, Theodore Gericault. Adams's Painting in Memory of Ian McLean, not included in the exhibition,
has a distinct resemblance to some of Gericault's sketches of severed human heads, made in preparation for The Raft of the 'Medusa' (1819). It also, of course, has links to Jacobean and later portrait images, where the subjects are shown of their deathbeds.
A well-known example is Van Dyck's Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby, on her Deathbed, which dates from 1633. One can then make a further link to the serial paintings of Egyptian mummies that have preoccupied Adams during the last several years. In many Romantic horror stories the mummy becomes the image of death itself, the bearer of a curse. It sometimes continues to fulfil this role in Hollywood B movies.
One conclusion one can immediately draw from this brief survey of Adams's typical themes is that he has a very wide range of cultural reference that embraces aspects of both 'high' and 'low' culture - the intellectual and the popular. What draws these extremes together is his pre-occupation with the processes of painting, drawing and printmaking. That is to say, the particular thing he chooses to represent is in the end only a template. What matters is the actual making.
A distinguished contemporary abstract painter, Sean Scully, who is also a skilful photographer, once said to me that the problem with photographs is that 'they have surface.' I think what he really meant by it, is was that he felt that photographs lacked physical density and thus, for him, essential object quality. Alexander Adams wants to restore this density to imagery that it for the most part photo-derived through an intense concentration on the surface that is now more commonly found in abstract art - that is when one can find it at all - than it is in figurative painting and drawing.
He is not, despite this, in any sense of the word Expressionist. Though his work contains Romantic elements, as I have pointed out, he is extremely wary of any kind of pictorial rhetoric. This lack of rhetoric is one of the reasons why he cannot accurately be described as a follower of Bacon.
In fact he belongs to a new school of artists, not as yet fully defined by criticism, who are picking up the pieces left by the late 20th century explosion of Conceptual ideas. They are trying to find a place for venerable skills within the framework of a radically altered artistic landscape.
The most traditional part of his work is its air of melancholy, which belongs as much, or more, to the British literary tradition as it does to any purely artistic one.
Edward Lucie-Smith
Excerpt from Alexander Adams Works on Paper
