Here, we talk to the artist about the surprising inspiration behind his most colossal body of work yet—and explore what these often nightmarish paintings have to do with love.
GQ: Tell me about the scope of this project—the number of paintings and drawings.
Wes Lang: Well, there’s 96 paintings and 96 drawings, which is by far the most ambitious thing that I’ve ever undertaken in my life. I had shown a few early works to Damien Hirst, and he gave me the advice to push it further. I originally thought I would make around 30 paintings and be able to tell a story. And then he suggested that I do about 100 of them.
Do you know why Damien suggested a hundred paintings?
He was just like, “Go big. Take an idea and flesh it out completely.” And instead of making 30 now and then 30 more in a couple years and 30 more…. It’s just like, This is the series. It’s called The Black Paintings. There’s 96 of them–and there will never be any more.
So, who are these guys?
I just call them the heroes. I don’t want to define who they actually are, but there is one particular guy who starts off as a piano player, and then he becomes sort of the—
Hero of all heroes.
The hero of all heroes, yeah.
What was the first painting, and when did you paint it?
There’s a small painting I made for an art fair in February of 2022. It’s called Invested Heavily. It was based off of this old lobby card from a serial from the 1920s. Serials were the sort of episodic shows that they’d put on at the movies in the ’20s and ’30s—before the features they would play serials. I found these images and they struck me really hard. I showed it to somebody and suggested, “Maybe I’ll make a little series out of these.” And they said, “Eh, I don’t know if that’s a great idea.” And I was like, “Oh, then that’s definitely a great idea.” [Laughs]
You said it wasn’t like you sat down and wrote a story for these guys. You were kind of discovering and expanding the world as you worked.
Yeah. But eventually there was a moment where I was like, “This needs to be a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end,” which I’ve never done before.
