In a conversation a few years ago with critic Lauren O’Neill-Butler, Adam Putnam spoke of his interest in what he called “the fragment format” and the role it plays in sustaining a certain state of spirit of circumspection that he wants to see present in his work – an “ambition to keep things hidden”, as he put it. For the artist, who has embraced a wide range of fashions and media over the past two decades, this willful opacity is not just floating obscurantism. Rather, it is designed to be placed in productive tension with the idea that meaningful connections are in fact ultimately detectable within and between the most esoteric sources, if only the right procedures and/or sensitivities are applied to them.
O’Neill-Butler and Putnam were talking about the artist’s 2017 “Portholes” photographic series, which includes approximately sixty small, dark and seductive gelatin silver prints that depict enigmatic bodies, pieces of architecture and scenes of nature. But since that project, Putnam’s deployment of the fragment to simultaneously suggest and preempt meaning has become even more deeply rooted. His next major work, ‘Landscapes’, 2019, consisted of sixteen small ink drawings focusing primarily on unidentified bits of sky and horizon, evoking a colorized version of Emily Nelligan’s work. Fr outdoors chiaroscuro. “Holes,” Putnam’s exhibition at PPOW, felt like a quantitative and qualitative apotheosis of these two projects – here his conceptual interests were even more atomized and dispersed among hundreds of discrete works. This densely compelling exhibition included a selection of framed forty-four-inch by thirty-inch drawings, a trio of gelatin silver prints, and an arrangement of long tables on which 377 “visualizations” in ink on postcard-like paper, 2020–, an ongoing series he started during the pandemic lockdown, has been posted. Also, simmering in a second gallery was Tower, 2023, an ominous white monolith that buzzed and buzzed as various kinds of ejecta occasionally percolated from orifices that dotted its surface. (The sculpture was based on another piece Putnam made for “Human Threads”, a 2022 exhibition at the Glasgow Tramway that featured projects designed to give people with profound and multiple learning disabilities the opportunity to interact with various sensory phenomena.)
When I first met Tower, most of its circular openings seemed inert. Occasionally, however, one would spit out a slick of bubbles, while another emitted a cloud of smoke – illuminated like a cirrus at sunset by a row of juicy-colored spotlights – which swirled above the heads of the spectators. Wispy remnants of the mist eventually made their way into the main gallery, hovering above the maze-like counters on which the viewing cards were laid out. Each of the larger framed drawings depicted a cavity cut into a decorative horizontal plane, like a tiled floor in a warm, dusty Iberian hallway, which extended backward toward a flat wall or horizon line. The geometric-triangular incisions in [Untitled] – Hole 4; trapezoidal in [Untitled] – Hole 5; rectangular and winding, in a recapitulation of the neighboring exhibition tables, in [Untitled] – Hole 6– were strategically positioned between the trap and the portal. However, [Untitled] Hole 2 (all 2021-22), with its glimpse from the top of a descending ladder, proposed that they were, at least in part, meant to be seen as means of escape, perhaps from the endless flatness of l multi-year isolation during which they were made.
Putnam’s colorful miniatures were the most populated element of the show. Escaping all but the most general categorization, the images, responding to both nature and culture, ran the gamut – figurative and abstract, disturbing and joyful, heavenly and earthly, mundane and spiritual. A hand offering a rose, a wave pouring from the open entrance of a brick building, a flash of lightning puckering a dark sky – taken together, Putnam’s paintings suggested a sort of dreamlike tarot deck in which the stable cosmology of Major and Minor Arcana has been replaced with an unfettered cascade of cryptically symbolic, inscriptive and decorative marks. Instead of functioning as windows into the future, however, these acted more like keyholes through which to view the emotional history of a person’s recent past, inside and out.
