Glenn Ligon
DOUBLE NEGATIVE
November 3 – December 23, 2023
Regen Projects, Los Angeles

With DOUBLE NEGATIVE, Glenn Ligon’s seventh exhibition at Regen Projects, the artist points to the work and all the reading (and reads) he has already traced in essays like “Black Light: David Hammons and the Poetics of Emptiness,” an essay in seven segments that appeared in the September 2004 issue of Artforum—and artworks—particularly the paintings he has inscribed with passages from James Baldwin’s 1953 essay, “Stranger in the Village,” a series that began in 1996. Whereas Baldwin’s text has appeared in parts, passages, and selections in those earlier works, it unfolds here in full across eighteen panels coupled as nine diptychs, affording what Ligon describes as “the ground on which the painting is sited.”

As if to deny or redact what has already been disclosed, X’s appear across the nine diptychs presented here, in-line, atop the essay and then more freely. Complicating the legibility of Baldwin’s words, the X’s push toward abstraction and create new meanings. The X proffers the possibility of excision or negation. To cross or x out is a literal embodiment of a familiar colloquialism presented en masse. And yet, Ligon courts its capacity to create perhaps more than evacuate meaning—recalling various forms of asemic writing, concrete poetry, and artistic touchstones including Henri Michaux, Norman Lewis, and Cy Twombly. A fundamental mark, the X arises even when other writing systems are absent, as in the use of the X to denote a signature. It also suggests political action, alluding to figures such as Malcolm X, whose adopted surname replaced one tied to a legacy of white supremancy.

In a 2021 profile of the artist for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Megan O’Grady observed that, “Ligon has in many ways inherited Baldwin’s mantle to become the foremost philosopher on race and identity in America.” Ligon’s pictures of Baldwin’s words are worth, and bear, repeating. Underscoring the difference ushered in by every mark made, Ligon’s DOUBLE NEGATIVE imagines a perpetual or generational conversation, a spectral call-and-response between Ligon, Baldwin, and innumerable others that exceeds language as we know it.