context… what people have to say

an interview with neal… by modou

and an essay from Obsessive Patterns, 2003

Hey Neal, what colors do you not use?
Only ultramarine blue.

I was expecting a list. What I could have said:
Hey Neal, there is a lot of red here.

But he is right. He is in his colors, a colored world; subtle, but very present, and it is precisely dark blue that is missing. I look for a chair, or something that could serve as one, because I just discovered a universe when I was only looking for an artist. The studio is full of light, but of night as well. Diogenes comes to mind, wandering the streets in full daylight with a kerosene lamp, searching for the light of man. I see an arsenal of art supplies: countless oil tubes, a small tree, books, a gas mask. As he says, the studio is his laboratory, his abode. Here he makes and undoes himself. Makes paintings. I am interpolated by the artist in his affinities with the Dada of Tristan Tzara, Ray Man, the polymaterial, the attempt to disembody, the intellectual vicegrip. Fluxux, too. The experimental movement of the 1960s in Europe that included Georges Maciunas, Joseph Beuys, Ben, Yoko Ono and other names no less illustrious served as a point of reference for his old group of friends in art practice and performance. They were futurist, Zen and radical in their attempts to reconcile art and life. Very poetic. Mystically philosophical. But also the New York abstractionists. I’m thinking of Pollock, but he insists it’s Mark Rothko, whose exhibit at the Tate he never forgave himself for missing while in London. Rothko is present in the desire to liberate himself from conventions, to liberate traditions. Ideas that inaugurate themselves in form, geometry. Distance with the kodachromic ambiance that initiates an entrance into poetry. A monochromic lyricism. Neal makes me pause, for his talkative muteness that he knows how to erect, like a wall, between himself and the other, the world. This while NPR and the BBC compete to fill the void left by his silence. The paintings too are walls of silence, ones that speak loudly, that are almost deafening. I get up, start to inspect the forms: a defense of the square, of the rectangle, experimentation of surface, dimension and vision. From the small window to the panoramic to the wide angle. Texture, a perishable organicity that posits itself in defiance of rigid discourse, of the Bible. Romance of his Judeo-Christian society is researched and investigated with Jacobin methods. Massive and austere in appearance. Soft, light and transparent in nature. The colors manage to vibrate between different shades of hot without however disturbing the material, whether it is canvas or wood. Nervures in agitation become manifest between the graphic and the surface sign in a sort of anxiety about what is going on. Materials formerly perishable, today carnal, enter the artist’s life, his painting, with modesty and propriety. New voices, stuttered overtures, murmurs… but not silences. Visual optophoneticism. A life circumstance in which the work’s promise to speak is kept.

– Modou, artist

 

An exerpt from an essay on the participants in Obsessive Patterns, at the David Winton Bell Gallery, June 2003.

Neal Walsh combines different materials — ranging from oil, pastel, dry pigment, ink, and graphite to masking tape and pages ripped from newspaper and old books — to create works that fluctuate between collages and assemblages. Walsh builds his surfaces by layering the materials on a wooden panel or a canvas, then removing some and adding others in their place. In this time-consuming, labor-intensive process of adding and sub-tracting, scraping/ripping off and putting on, each work goes through a phase that allows chance to play a part, but only to be balanced or controlled by the artist's hand. In this sense, Walsh's work parallels interchangeable patterns in nature and life: growth and decay, chance and control. full text here