David Adjaye and Adam Pendleton
Pace
Hong Kong

We tend to think of fracture as a kind of termination—an end to a functional and desirable wholeness in form, as with a broken vase, or in meaning, viz. a breakdown in communication. In a compelling dual presentation at Pace Hong Kong, architect David Adjaye and artist Adam Pendleton advance the productive capacities of disaggregated form. It is in the act of splitting—marble segments in the case of Adjaye’s sculptures, and semantic structures in Pendleton’s text- based paintings—that the two friends, exhibited together for the first time, open up spaces of play and fugitive meaning.

On the walls were nine paintings—the largest spanning more than two by three meters— from Pendleton’s series Untitled (WE ARE NOT) (2020). Each features various configurations of the words “we,” “are,” and “not,” repeated in densely layered sprays of black and white silkscreen ink. Drips and splatters obliterate the canvas, while some letters are mapped over their analogues, producing harshly silhouetted forms that stand out from or recede into the monochrome chaos. Pendleton links their creation to both graffiti and fresco, the technique of painting on “fresh” plaster, thereby integrating the art and the wall’s surface. Indeed, barring sections of slight translucency that betray the depths of ink beneath—a streak of blacker black here, a spray of turbid gray there—the many layers coalesce inextricably into a kind of glossy flatness. The impenetrable surface is matched by semantic opacity, and here the work takes on graffiti’s abstraction of lexical meaning through stylized repetition, with the three constituent words composed in a visual stutter. Some of the works are koan-like, such as one that reads (to my eyes), “NOT WE NOT ARE WE NOT ARE”—a declaration that turns back unto itself with the implicit question, “ARE WE NOT”? Do these paintings indicate absence (“we are not”) or a presence that is distinct (“we are not”)? Pendleton’s works reverberate with an oppositional indeterminacy, presenting an illegible surface of compressed lexical forms to yield a dilation of non-restrictive and manifold meaning.

This dynamic of compression and expansion also informs Adjaye’s modular marble pyramids, which embody his longstanding investigations in disruptions of form as well as the collapse of multiple temporalities in his structures. In their “primary form,” the marble pyramids embody a collision of Egyptian and Western classical monumental styles. Antiquity is inscribed in the very material, the lines in the marble a register of geological compression. Yet in their configurability the slabs invoke a temporality of becoming in the here and now. Eyeing the gaps between the constituent blocks, I was possessed by a childish impulse to pry open the pyramid, yet this hope of entry was inapt; the structure is not meant to be accessed but rebuilt. One possible rearrangement is an inversion of the triangular pieces such that they enclose a diamond- shaped hollow, a “void,” but also, as Adjaye suggests, a space for people to sit and convene.

In a conversation with Pendleton filmed by Pace, Adjaye described abstraction as “the device that is able to bring the many into a kind of singular idea.” In their exhibition, the works of both artists evoke the enigma of the monolith, mimic its impenetrable surfaces, yet they also mark a refusal to be monolithic. Adjaye’s and Pendleton’s configurable, fragmented forms contest essentialization or ossification, asserting a right to be fleeting, unknowable, elusive. Their works come up against the power that both demands and denies identification, the kind of power that renders people both hypervisible in their “otherness” and invisible in their marginality. In a world in which states constantly wield this power to entrench unjust stratification and to eliminate dissent, slipperiness can be a productive strategy. Adjaye and Pendleton carve out spaces for unfixedness, unreadability, unrestraint, staking their claim to a “not” in which the “we are” may take shape.

• David Adjaye
• Adam Pendleton