Posted in: Comics | Tagged: adam dant, blacks

Adam Dant Maps Out Humanity, Currently at Blacks Club in London

In recent weeks, Blacks Club in Soho, London, has been exhibiting works by the cartoonist and cartographer Adam Dant, with a focus on his London work. Repeatedly described as a modern-day William Hogarth, whose 18th-century satirical prints were created with a moral purpose in mind, his works have been hung alongside the Hogarth prints that run up and down the stairs at the longstanding club.

For the last few weeks, I have been fascinated by his piece hanging in the club, The Paradise Of Sleaze, created in 2019 and covering scandal in the city over 500 years, and which has sent me down various rabbit holes of discovery. Dant's work is intended to investigate "the interconnectedness of everything" that takes data points and expresses them as cartoon maps, large sepia ink-on-paper drawings described as "psycho-histories", "Monuments" and "Panoramas of colliding histories and fictions".

This week, Blacks Club held an Evening with the Artist, selling prints of his work, attended by members, fans of the artists and a few hangers-on, with mulled wine and mince pieces to make up for the trudge across frozen London during a national train strike.

Adam Dant talked about his appreciation for the history of the place and how his work fitted in with the area, its reputation and of William Hogarth whom he has been repeatedly linked of late, wishing us all good cheer on such a cold night out.

And watching the members and guests enjoy the work on display, spending good half hours with pieces, reading and absorbing as much as they could, it emphasised the power of a cartoon for conveying information in a gripping and involving fashion, with people able to appreciate pieces in multiple ways, the visual, the text and the combination of the two. As Neil Gaiman once said, comics are just words and pictures, and you can do anything with words and pictures. Adam Dant is proof of that.

Adam Dant's work can be found here, and the exhibition is available at Blacks on Dean Street, Soho until next year.

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