In the present lot, the viewer is confronted with a fragment of almost unreadable text stencilled onto a canvas and covered in a shiny black dust. Glenn Ligon’s Stranger #45 is one from a series of paintings that the African American artist created during a span of thirteen years and that appropriates fragments of a fellow African American writer: James Baldwin. In 1953, Baldwin wrote an essay titled 'Stranger in the Village' where he reflected upon his time spent writing away from America in a little town in Switzerland. For many of the villagers, Baldwin was the first black person they encountered, and his presence generated in the Swiss a mix of curiosity and despise. Ligon takes Baldwin’s study about race, identity and otherness as the narrative content for his abstract paintings.

For Ligon, certain parts of Baldwin’s text are clear and straightforward in their propositions, but other sections are much more obscure. In the same way, Ligon transfers the text to his canvas sometimes in a legible way, but other times in a blurry, crusty and diffuse typeface that provokes a struggle in the audience to understand.

Appropriation is a common technique in Ligon’s oeuvre; for him, it is the way to add content to his otherwise apparently 'content-free' paintings. As the printing of text became more methodical, Ligon talks about text becoming intrinsic to the painting and that everything else becomes innecesary, and the appropriated text then turns into abstraction. Ligon explains: 'Sol LeWitt had a huge influence on my work because of his use of repetition and his clarity, setting up a system and letting that system go. That’s kind of where the text paintings come from.' (G. Ligon interviewed by J. Moran, Interview Magazine, 2009, accessed online).

In the present lot, Ligon uses a stencil to press the coal dust covered letters on the canvas. Parts of the text appears almost effaced, making the reliance on the narrative of the text impossible. Interpreting the work becomes a joined effort between what the title suggests and the struggle of the audience to understand, the beauty of the material and its insignificance.

For Ligon the use of coal in this works '… was very visceral and bumped up the physicality of the text, but at the same time obscured the text…. Coal dust is an interesting material for me because it’s beautiful; it’s a black, shiny material, but it’s also a waste product … leftover from coal processing…. I am drawn to it because of all of the contradictory readings it engenders. Worthless. Waste. Black. Beautiful. Shiny. Reflective. I think it’s interesting also because Baldwin takes this sense of perceived negatives being black, being gay, and being poor and sees them as 'hitting the jackpot.' It is from that position, that of the outsider, from which you can actually say the most.' (Glenn Ligon: Stranger, The Studio Museum of Harlem. New York, NY, 2001.)