Catalogue essay published on the occasion of 'UK06 : Touring solo exhibition', Japan 2006
Text by: Rikke Hansen

Japanese version

One of the most striking features of Adam Thompson's work is his tireless dedication to undoing that favourite of artistic motifs: the landscape. Traditionally, photographs and paintings of landscapes refer back to the physical locations they represent, but here we are presented with 'placeless' sceneries, stripped of all recognisable traces and given elusive titles, such as 3017, or simply Untitled.

These investigations take on a variety of forms, one of which is the creation of 3-D miniature models. The scaled-down constructions evoke mental images of burnt-out landscapes and the aftermath of war or environmental disaster, whilst being strangely pleasing to the eye; the blackness in these works is deep, but also without depth. There are no specific details to focus on, apart from perhaps the tiny flags placed within the landscapes; this lack of any central features paradoxically tempts our gaze to linger all the longer and we are caught out enjoying these apocalyptic scenes, despite their alarming connotations. In Thompson's photographic works he appropriates and alters landscape imagery from postcards, magazines and other printed media. Again, these remarkable prints are characterised by an intense darkness, produced by subtracting identifiable features from the originals. Only the middle part of the image stands out, the rest is completely black, and we are trapped, looking out from within a dark, dark forest, more reminiscent of fairytales, than of the nightmares evoked in the landscape models.

Another strand of Thompson's work also challenges the conventions of photographic representation, but here the manipulation goes beyond the picture plane to involve direct interventions within the exhibition space. Having mounted a 'typical' landscape photograph onto the wall, he chisels away half the image (the part depicting the ground), cutting into the gallery wall and leaving only the representation of the sky and the outline of the photograph intact. This iconoclastic gesture positions itself within a tradition, concerned less with the construction of new imagery than with the de(con)struction of the ideologies surrounding its production. Key, here, is Lucio Fontana's monochrome canvas sliced down the middle, titled Concetto spaziale (1960). Also relevant is Karin Sander's Peephole (1993), in which the artist drilled a hole in the gallery wall, symbolically 'puncturing' the myth of the exhibition space as hermetically distinct from its historical, social and economic surroundings, whilst simultaneously implying a playful comparison between art exhibitions and pornographic peepshows.

Such physical attacks upon the picture plane - or the wall lying beyond it - make the concrete, material aspect of art come forth. And yet, Thompson's focus appears to be situated elsewhere, pushing these strategies beyond the issue of institutional critique in order to explore the more philosophical question of how things 'appear'. This, at first, makes his concerns seem akin to those of Sander - taking apart the politics of 'looking' - but contrary to Sander's work, Thompson's intervention relies, not on revelation, but on ambiguity. Disenchantment tends to bring with it a new enchantment, and in removing the wall's surface a new image is created. Craters in the wall become valleys in the landscape, and colours suggest different topographies depending on the wall's construction: a yellowy wooden wall may invoke a cornfield, a grey concrete wall a landscape of rocks or mountains. This is a work bound to the site of intervention, but easily re-created in different locations, and this constitutes its magic.

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Rikke Hansen is an Art Theory lecturer at Goldsmiths College, London