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Lot Essay
Towering almost three metres in height, Debris Field #5 (2018) is an impressive large-scale work from Glenn Ligon’s series of the same name. Fragments of black lettering are scattered across the white canvas, offering flashes of meaning that fall apart into free-floating abstraction. Ligon is renowned for his use of text, which he deploys in a variety of different media to explore themes of race, language, desire, sexuality and identity. The ‘Debris Fields’ resulted from experiments with the stencils he typically uses for his text paintings. Rather than reproducing lines of quotation, he began to explore the abstracting effect of stencilling individual letterforms with ink, which distorts and alters their shapes. Blowing up a small etching, he created a large-scale screen which he then used to silkscreen onto canvas using etching ink. As in the present work, the thick, slow-drying black pigment causes drips, slippages and voids, heightening the tensions between legibility, obscurity, abstraction and the figure that have long driven Ligon’s practice.
After beginning his career as an abstract painter, Ligon began to incorporate text into his works in the late 1980s. He looked to prominent African-American writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, using their words in ways that visually reflected their ideas, as well as drawing on his own experience as a queer black man living in the United States. His ‘Prologue’ series stencilled the opening text of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in shades of black and grey, with each line becoming progressively more clouded and obscure. His long-running ‘Stranger’ series featured excerpts from Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village’, which describes the author’s intensely alienating sojourn—feeling at once hyper-visible and unseen—as the only black person living in a remote Swiss community. Ligon reproduced Baldwin’s words in black-on-black oil stick and glittering coal dust, rendering the text almost indecipherable. His related ‘Figure’ series beset the same text with torn elisions that recall the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still. In tune with his literary forebears, Ligon exposed language, image and identity as mercurial things, revealing and concealing, shifting or disintegrating according to their context and presentation.
With the ‘Debris Field’ series, Ligon took a more open, painterly approach to the canvas. ‘I realised that so much of my work has been about taking text toward abstraction,’ he explained, ‘but what if I started with the letterforms themselves, and took them directly to abstraction? What if I drew through plastic letter stencils with ink to see what shapes are formed? … What fascinated me was the idea of inventing a language, inventing a new form out of the letters themselves, and these paintings are much more improvisational because of that. They aren’t bound by lines of text or quotations but are much more about improvisation and composition’ (G. Ligon quoted in H. Copeland, ‘Meeting with Glenn Ligon, American art legend currently exhibited at the Carré d’art in Nîmes’, Numéro, 24 June 2022). In this sense the ‘Debris Fields’ extend the treatment of letters and numbers by artists as diverse as Jannis Kounellis, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool, who have variously asked at what point such figures can break from their sign value to become pure physical forms. Debris Field #5 reflects a newfound freedom in Ligon’s work, its signifiers dissolved and re-formed as abstract notations in a new, hitherto unseen language of possibility.
After beginning his career as an abstract painter, Ligon began to incorporate text into his works in the late 1980s. He looked to prominent African-American writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, using their words in ways that visually reflected their ideas, as well as drawing on his own experience as a queer black man living in the United States. His ‘Prologue’ series stencilled the opening text of Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) in shades of black and grey, with each line becoming progressively more clouded and obscure. His long-running ‘Stranger’ series featured excerpts from Baldwin’s 1953 essay ‘Stranger in the Village’, which describes the author’s intensely alienating sojourn—feeling at once hyper-visible and unseen—as the only black person living in a remote Swiss community. Ligon reproduced Baldwin’s words in black-on-black oil stick and glittering coal dust, rendering the text almost indecipherable. His related ‘Figure’ series beset the same text with torn elisions that recall the abstract paintings of Clyfford Still. In tune with his literary forebears, Ligon exposed language, image and identity as mercurial things, revealing and concealing, shifting or disintegrating according to their context and presentation.
With the ‘Debris Field’ series, Ligon took a more open, painterly approach to the canvas. ‘I realised that so much of my work has been about taking text toward abstraction,’ he explained, ‘but what if I started with the letterforms themselves, and took them directly to abstraction? What if I drew through plastic letter stencils with ink to see what shapes are formed? … What fascinated me was the idea of inventing a language, inventing a new form out of the letters themselves, and these paintings are much more improvisational because of that. They aren’t bound by lines of text or quotations but are much more about improvisation and composition’ (G. Ligon quoted in H. Copeland, ‘Meeting with Glenn Ligon, American art legend currently exhibited at the Carré d’art in Nîmes’, Numéro, 24 June 2022). In this sense the ‘Debris Fields’ extend the treatment of letters and numbers by artists as diverse as Jannis Kounellis, Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool, who have variously asked at what point such figures can break from their sign value to become pure physical forms. Debris Field #5 reflects a newfound freedom in Ligon’s work, its signifiers dissolved and re-formed as abstract notations in a new, hitherto unseen language of possibility.