Adam Pendleton is the author of a multifaceted body of work that reactivates the questions opened up by the historical avant-gardes. His practice, admittedly experimental, is based on the idea of “Black Dada”, a term coined by the artist in 2008 to designate a visual philosophy that questions preconceived notions of history and culture, recontextualising concepts such as identity and blackness, and questioning the relationship between past and present, legibility and abstraction, familiar and strange - postulating, in short, that meaning always develops through difference. Interested in redefining abstraction as a language and creative system, Pendleton draws on a wide range of cultural and political references, not infrequently adopting existing images and texts, from which he establishes his own language of transposed forms and gestures, in a kind of continuous writing.

- Untitled (WE ARE NOT),
2021, is both an evolution of previous works and a synthesis of new material strategies, evoking both the predominantly minimalist “Black Dada” paintings made from 2008 onwards and the developments that began to emerge in his practice at the end of 2016 involving the use of painted text and gesture. The work is part of a series of paintings structured from the application of sprays, splashes, drips and fragments of paint, which are then photographed and transposed onto silkscreen, in a process that nullifies the original materiality and purposely blurs the distinctions between the acts of painting, drawing and photographing.

As well as reflecting the artist's interest in the possibilities of abstraction in the field of the relationship between language, minimalism and expressiveness, the series in which this work is included penetrates social and political territories, reflected in the use of a black and white palette (which the artist pointedly refuses to associate exclusively with racial issues) and in the phrase WE ARE NOT. This formulation evokes a speech given in 1964 by black American civil rights activist Malcolm X and, at the same time, refers to the - Black Dada Manifesto
itself, from 2008, which suggests that we can be defined by what we are not:

[...]

Black Dada: We are not naive

Black Dada: We are successive

Black Dada: We are not exclusive.

[...]

The energetic lyrics and superimposed text allude to the historical significance of those discourses and their timeless importance. At the same time, they are questioned and relativised: Pendleton paints the phrase WE ARE NOT - ad nauseum
in several iterations until, due to the simple act of repetition, the words begin to lose meaning, making way for something purely abstract and almost unrecognisable as text and as narrative.