Pope.L's first solo show in London in more than a decade on view at Modern Art
Pope.L, Notations, Holes and Humour, Modern Art Bury Street, exhibition view, 15 July - 28 August 2021. Courtesy: the artist, Modern Art, London and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, USA. Photo: Tom Carter.
LONDON
.-Modern Art is presenting a solo exhibition of work by Pope.L entitled Notations, Holes and Humour. This is Pope.Ls first exhibition with Modern Art, and his first solo show in London in more than a decade.
Pope.Ls exhibition with Modern Art centres on his ongoing project, Skin Set, a constantly growing and shifting group of text-inflected works across many media that consider the construction of language, identity and stereotype as notation, hole and frequently absurdity and humour. The show, installed on both floors of the gallery, contains video, silkscreen, assemblage, floor pieces and paintings made between 2015 and 2021. On view are several medicine cabinets originally shown at the University of Chicagos Neubauer Collegium earlier this year. Each cabinet contains a plexiglass-encased painting illuminated by LED light. The incongruity of the cabinets, their altar-like aspect and the frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame mode create a curious preciousness that is called into question by the text inscribed on the paintings, such as Violet People Are Plusher. The medicine cabinet works share the walls with assemblages on panel, whose paper surfaces are scraped, inscribed, sliced, decorated and punctured creating the experience of painting as a page-space that is simultaneously coming together and coming apart. Despite medicine cabinet caves, punctured surfaces, altar-light, bits of letters pushed to the margins of the canvas, the usage of text is insistently present in these works. Circa (2015) is a group of twenty-four oil on linen paintings, each containing the word fuchsia, which is usually misspelled, painted in bright pink and paired with another word with which it rhymes, such as: abracadabra, diarrhoea, or bwana, among others. Here, legibility is undercut by scratches, crumples, gouges and smudges staging a space of writing not just as an act of communication but also one of visual glossolalia, a space somewhere between physical colour, the actual colour of a word, the word itself, the word used to describe the word and something different altogether. Visitors might notice that one of the 24 paintings has yet to be hung on its cleat. The eminent painting will change throughout the run of the show at the behest of the artist.