A Review of Ruins and Landscapes

Adams’ palette consists of two paints, Titanium White and Lamp Black. In limiting himself to two paints alone Adams’ has prompted an exploration of art with restraint. The results are both bold and contemplative.

As the title suggests the works take landscapes and ruins as figurative subjects: forests, wasteland and the buildings of post -war Berlin.

The majority of the ruin paintings are collected on one wall, no bigger than A4, arranged like photos awaiting a hand to choose their place in the binding of an album . The paintings are based on original photographs taken in Berlin after the war. A box - like tenement sits behind the debris of the adjacent building, a warped staircase shines in a dark room and the remaining lumps of a bridge bear crumbling stone lions that stare peaceably across the river.

Despite the implication of a presence behind the camera the pictures captured are without people. I imagine this lone figure walking through a silent city, the sole human presence. Though the pictures record the devastation of war they don’t feel melancholic. Isolated within the canvas and composed of paint they are more reminiscent of still life. The smudges of shaped shade further remove the viewer from the original subject matter. From eye, to photo, to paint, to eye, taking steps back from the sharpest delineation.

A larger painting takes us to a burning building. It is a ruin but not in the same sense as those described above. That it will become ruined is confirmed by the smoke that surrounds it. In its immediacy it emphasises the shock of being in the moment. A ruin is primary evidence of some destructive force, it evokes feelings about a building’s past. Here the painting does something similar. In portraying a burning building alongside other ruins the viewer is encouraged to rethink how they perceive the passage of time, not with any conclusion to be sought but as an exercise of the sentiment.

In painting with so many greys the substance of the building appears to spill into the smoke and snow, as if both are comprised of the same material. This coalescence of appearance is developed in the series of ‘Wasteland’ paintings. At first it isn’t clear what you are seeing until an image slowly emerges. You begin to grasp at the pits and fissures that break through the rubble strewn landscape. Water, or ice lies quietly in small pools as white as the sky above. Nothing in these paintings is defined, the scenery is engendered by the sweeps and flat strokes of the paints. The scraps of paint on the canvas imitate the debris that litters the grey planes.

The landscape paintings are less reflective and more involving. Of the landscapes, one of the most striking paintings, entitled ‘Palisade’, depicts a forest coated in a layer of snow. We do not see any roots or the canopy but the main trunks. As the eye settles on the surface of the picture it is inundated by the flickering strips of contrasting tones. The branches vie for your attention drawing you through the depths allowing only the occasional pause where a distant clearing is hinted by brighter strokes. The density of the scene grows as shapes and squiggles crawl in between the naturalistic details. Straight bars of paint can be found nestled in the spaces within while dark grey diamonds spring between tree trunks. They distract from the sense of realism that the painting might evoke on initial viewing before reintegrating themselves into the painting as the thickness of shade reasserts itself. This painting reminds me of the visual sensation experienced while fixing a stare at an object in the middle-distance as the background appears to dissolve and surge.

Though this exhibition of ruins and landscapes is ostensibly predicated on an exploration of expression confined by colour the experimental aspect of using two paints alone is not something that one is mindful of when looking at the work. In black and white Adams’ has formed expressions that are pensive and mesmerising. Texture and depth shine through and vitalise the canvas pushing shapes and forms to the surface. The effects appears deliberate rather than as a result of pre - meditated conceptual restrictions; it is in the activity of the painting itself more so than the preparation. What is clear is that the paintings don’t employ black and white as a nostalgic cue but as a prompt to consider the ongoing narrative of an event that gestures towards the future and the past: the snow melts and the smoke dissipates.