Newport Street Gallery brings us the first exhibition of Wes Lang in the U.K. Wes Lang: The Black Paintings is a deeply moving, emotional show that lets the viewer take a glimpse into the world of the celebrated American artist.
Lang’s creativity draws from a wide range of sources, from childhood memories and ephemera he gathered and treasured as his “talismans” to icons and symbols from ancient philosophies and cultures. He is influenced by artists as diverse as Vuillard, Munnings, Bacon and Basquiat.
All these elements fuse in Lang’s art creating a dramatic universe full of playful steganography. At the centre of it all, is the wish of the artist to motivate audiences to lead fulfilling lives and to believe in themselves. The Black Paintings series in fact was created in reaction to what Lang calls “The prevailing narrative of negativity” in the world.
Left, Wes Lang, Ballad, 2023. Acrylic on linen. Right, Cloud, 2023. Acrylic on canvas.
Wes Lang: The Black Paintings features an extensive collection of works, all of them produced between 2022 and 2024. Like in a storybook, we found in this show a narrative thread that takes the viewer from one canvas to the next. The protagonists are often his signature skeletons, who he considers the heroes of the story, and who “are forced into scenarios where evil keeps popping up but never looks the same.” Through his work, Lang rejects the “Divisive Faces of Evil” in our society: money, political affiliation, commerce…
The Black Paintings show is organised so the viewers can let themselves be taken by Wes Lang onto a memorable journey of positive affirmation.
Room by room, the viewer feels increasingly hypnotised by Lang’s narrative and provocative style. Dark, sinister backgrounds alternate with lush landscapes in which the characters get increasingly together to identify and repudiate evil, regardless of the face it chooses to present.
It is here that we see the influence in Lang’s art of eastern spiritual philosophies to which his mother introduced him, mainly Tao Te Ching, the central Taoist text, and the lectures of the American spiritual guru, Ram Dass. At the end of viewing The Black Paintings, Lang says his intention is that we realise “that all this noise and all these divisive faces of evil that we’re told matter, don’t have to consume your mind and the way you feel about the world.”
The positive message in the series is underpinned by Lang’s deep belief that “we are born as vessels of love, and we are all just one gigantic soul that’s all interconnected. And so I set out to make this body of work show this belief.”
Author: Julia Pasarón
Wes Lang: The Black Paintings
Newport Street Gallery
1 Newport St. London SE11 6AJ. More details, HERE.
Read our full interview with Wes Lang in our winter issue, available in our online store and quality newsagents in the UK. A shorter version is available HERE.
Alongside the shot at Newport Street Gallery, 96 works on paper by Wes Lang are on show at HENI Gallery (6-10 Lexington St. London W1F 0LE) until 22nd November 2024. More details, HERE.
Opening image: from Wes Lang, Global Resurrection, 2022. Acrylic on canvas. Image cropped from the original.
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