Like a Ghost from the Memory Arising Unbidden

Alexander Adams works in black and white by traditional means, using pencil and paint, lino cut, etching and engraving. He also writes. This introduction to his work draws heavily upon his writings, though Adams would be the first to acknowledge that any verbal statement about art is a translation from an intuitive, mysterious activity which, finally, is untranslatable. Adams either writes with dip pen in the flowery old-fashioned script of long ago, or he types – yes, types – on an old portable whose ink ribbons fluctuate between furiously-definite black and ghostly near-dissolution, investing a resonant uncertainty to words and passages, a disturbing quality that can never be attained by the uniformly inkjetted page. The medium is an important part of Adams’s message; it is a way of embedding the element of time into his work. Deliberately he chooses the artisanal methods of a recently-superseded culture, the half-remembered culture of our fathers, invoking the promise of loss, the echoes of prelude and refrain. Painting and printmaking, calligraphy and typewriting: it is easy to assume that he must be an old man stuck in the techniques of the pre-digital age. In fact, he is a young man inescapably caught up in the fluvial myth of time as transience, memory, landscape and loss.
Between 1992 and 1995, Adams attended Goldsmiths College in London. ‘It was a tough vocation to be a painter in Goldsmiths. When I was studying there it was the crucible of installation and Conceptual
art. Figurative art was regarded with scepticism and embarrassment. Many students gave up painting due to the intense pressure… The concept of Romanticism and the genre of history painting fascinated me. The perversity of attempting a kind of modern history painting appealed to me. Cézanne wanted to re-make Poussin from nature; my ambition was to re-make Friedrich from photography.’

‘I decided to restrict myself to black and white, initially to test my inventiveness and perseverance. Later, I became increasingly engaged by the peculiar difficulties… I wanted to discover how poignant and vital art could be within very restricted parameters… I wanted to re-make the world. But this would be an artificial world, an impossible place bounded by absurd restrictions… an art that seeks to put the whole world into a limitless sequence of tiny rectangles made only of black, white and grey.’ii
Romanticism is the opposite of memory. Invoking the ideal, it stands at an utopian distance form lived
reality. Its intensity exerts a fascination precisely because it is unrealistic and unattainable. ‘For me,’
writes Adams, ‘it is the pathological character of Romanticism that is one of its most absorbing aspects.

Romanticism is no less tyrannical than Classicism or Modernism.’iii And so he took on the pathologically narrow iconography of Romanticism: the empty landscape, the lonely figure, the ruin and the forest, all of which serve both as archetype and as symbol for self.

‘If my art has any power, it resides in connections and effects that elude explanation. Often the connections my subconscious makes are strange to me.’iv There is nothing new about the recognition of the subconscious as the basis of all art, and the major means of communication between ourselves and the inhospitable world.