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How can we have the benefit of magnificence, figuring out the cruelty that goes on throughout us? On this exhibition, Melvin Edwards requested this query in earnest, looking for a solution within the foundational American contradiction between our acknowledged ultimate of freedom and the violence underlying it.
The present was named for its largest work, Traces for the Poet, 1970/2023, a sculptural set up mounted in a nook of the room. There, lengths of barbed wire cascaded from adjoining partitions. They met within the center; these strands hooked into the lengthy arm of a metal beam, forming a hammock-like help to droop it simply above the bottom, the place it thrust into house just like the prow of a ship. Characteristically, the work merges abstraction with evocation. It distills gravity into a proper precept à la post-Minimal “traces in house.” However it does so in supplies irredeemably related to coercive enclosure and enforced separation—particularly, with the anti-Black brutality on the core of American historical past.
Edwards is finest identified for these barbed-wire installations, in addition to for his ongoing “Lynch Fragments” sequence, 1960–, which incorporates wall-mounted, welded-steel assemblages composed of extremely charged supplies (chains, padlocks, scissors, knives, amongst different objects). Not too long ago, these sculptures have been featured in a number of high-profile displays at main museums. One may anticipate Edwards to take pleasure in his well-deserved, albeit belated, recognition. As an alternative, he short-circuits our crucial comprehension with shocking unseen work.
In 2019, Alexander Grey Associates confirmed “Painted Sculpture,” a pageant of freestanding welded works in major colours: joyous experiments in axiality, stability, and solidity. These abstractions remind us of how sure kinds tug us alongside in our on a regular basis embodied expertise, the best way that an entrance appears to solicit passage, or a ladder climbing. With out Edwards’s typical politicized supplies, these playful kinds resist any didacticism.
Centered on its sculptural namesake, “Traces for the Poet” appeared like a return to extra acquainted terrain. However it was in any other case dedicated to beforehand unexhibited works on paper—pictures with their very own enigmatic significance. To make them, Edwards laid chains and wire atop unpainted sheets as he utilized pigment. Utilizing these implements as masking, he retained unfavourable reserves in fields of luscious shade. Generally soaked by means of the paper, generally dripped alongside its floor, generally loaded onto a brush and blasted with a twig bottle, this liquid tint felt sportive and joyous.
Saturation, gesture, and chromatics come collectively in idiosyncratic methods. One might, I suppose, evaluate the works with Helen Frankenthaler’s stains, Sam Gilliam’s dyes, or Jules Olitski’s sprays. However the specters of chain and wire are so important to their impact—as kinds in addition to figures—that the comparability by no means will get off the bottom. On the one hand, Edwards alludes to the vaunted Americanness of formalist portray, through which experimental paint software metaphorizes our nationwide aspiration to freedom and autonomy. On the opposite, he reinscribes that story with the repressive violence at its core, devices of cruelty showing as spectral blankness, reminders of what US triumphalism should omit or disavow. These absences scar the surfaces like outdated wounds, by no means absolutely healed, that at all times throb upfront of rain.
The duality makes these works each arresting and disquieting. Edwards thus challenges us to reconcile the brutal evocations of their silhouetted instruments with the rapturous satisfaction of their materials qualities. Torment turns into magnificence: not within the trite means of lemons yielding lemonade, however in a galvanizing contradiction between the aspirational modernism that the artist genuinely celebrates and the sorts of repression with which this custom is complicit. Edwards probes the disturbing seductiveness of violence on the nexus of delight and ache.
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