Glenn Ligon: Post-Noir

Glenn Ligon was born in New York in 1960. Initially, his artistic practice was centered on painting, inspired by the heritage of artists such as Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns, as well as the legacy of more recent conceptual art. Ligon began quoting text in his works very early on, using stenciled words that would become a signature of his oeuvre. He uses painted language to highlight the social and political value systems that give these texts meaning and how they are altered or underscored through thework.

The first room of the exhibition brings together a selection of America light installations. Begun in 2008, these neons transform the word “America” by covering it in black paint, flipping, reversing, or animating it, treating it as linguistic material to be manipulated and changed. In his large-format oil and serigraph Debris Field paintings, the artist focuses his attention on isolated letterforms and non-linguistic mark making rather than legible words. These forms float on the surface of the canvas, generating a series of rhythmic improvised compositions and ultimately create an open-ended system that allows the artist to explore, in his own words, “the possibility of meaning, the elements of meaning.” A monumental new diptych from the Stranger series is also presented. It incorporates the entire text of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,” in which Baldwin recounts his stay in a tiny Swiss village, where most of the inhabitants had never encountered a black man before. Also on view are paintings inspired by workshops with young children as part of a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1999–2000. Ligon chose Afrocentric illustrations from the 1960s and 70s for the children to color in, and then reproduced the results on large canvases to create a painting series called Coloring.

Post-Noir at Carré d’Art is Ligon’s first solo exhibition at a French institution.