disCONNECT: 1 house 10 artists

 

DisCONNECT

South London

24 July - 24 August 2020

 

Crunching up the gravel drive to a flight of steps leading to a house in a posh terrace set back from leafy Clapham Common, we peered through white double doors in an anonymous raised ground floor entrance.  As a setting for a cutting edge urban art show it seemed quite unlikely, we turned on our heels lest they set the hounds on us.  A door creaked open and a voice called “Looking for the art?”

The premise behind "disCONNECT" is that someone with money has bought a seriously expensive house and prior to doing an iceberg basement redevelopment job has invited 10 artists in to make-over the premises.   Viruses escaping from labs threw a spanner in the works though, so several of the artists incorporate a sense of the pandemic in their pieces and 6 of the artists being based overseas had to make and install their work using Skype, like scientists cautiously tweaking the location of the reactor rods by remote cctv.

Herakut, Germany

 

The Art world is not providing too much in the way of real life excitement these days and while one should never confuse the art world with the real world, or indeed the world of street art, it was a pleasure to experience disCONNECT for real just before it closes this week.

If I had been asked 2 weeks ago to guess which artists would feature on my uploads more than once in the next month, it would have been a hell of a rollcall before the name Alex Fakso came up.  This legendary trainyard graff snapper specialises in candid portraiture; his  2012 “Santa in Camo” show in Kensal Rise indicated a quite idiosyncratic approach to subject as did his 2017 Moniker contribution.   In this installation crowds in the photos rush towards the viewer in a way that feels horrifyingly alien in these public-gathering avoiding socially distanced coronavirus times.

 

 

Alex Fakso

Alex Fakso

Seeing Zoerism’s geometric and intricate graffiti on the streets is a rare pleasure and his anamorphic experience echoed that hugely detailed style.  Anamorphic images are designed to be viewed from one spot and look a bit skew-whiff from any other, this image was installed flat on the floor and up against the wall creating this impressive 3D “trick of the eye”.

 

 Zoer

 

Herakut’s fusion of photorealism and spindly elfin characters in Davy Crockett hats shouldn’t work but looks awesome.  You are invited to sit for a selfie with the monkey in the nursery -  if your chess game is up to scratch.  The kids in the playroom have painted child-like drawings on the nursery walls, they are credited to a 7 year old Ryker but is there a hint of an insider joke there?  

Herakut

 

A double set of doors and a single door were shipped to Portugal for Vhils to work his magic, a refreshing reminder of his talent for “discovered texture” portraiture.   His mining into layers of adverts to reveal portraits works superbly where it belongs, out on the streets but it’s a bit of a puzzle why having an implausibly deep block of compressed billboard adverts would work indoors.

Vhils

 

The dark entrance lobby was made over by a collection of Mr Cenz’ cosmic ladies, UV light brought sharpness to the highlights that define the outline of the faces, an effect we love to play with when photographing his portraits out on the streets.  Unfortunately we omitted to get any photos in the lobby though the effect can be vaguely appreciated in this mercifully brief video snippet.

 

feat: Isaac Cordal, Mr Cenz, Aida Wild, Zoerism

 

In lockdown Aida Wilde railed against the reckless anti social behaviour of people ignoring the social distancing, lockdown "stay-the-fuck-away" instructions.  Her “Granny alley” installation in the most challenging room in the house distills a lot of that passion and anger into blocks of text and her emoji infused pseudo-flock wallpaper.

 

Aida Wilde

 

 

Aida Wilde

 

After years of vicariously enjoying Icy and Sot’s art finally we saw a piece in real life.   The dining table apparently was found in the kitchen, in which case it must have been a relic from the downstairs kitchen many years ago.  The beautifully conceived and executed articulated plates and cutlery apparently represent capitalism with the extension leaves up and a full plate on the table.  With the extension down symbolised socialism, in which case this neither-up-nor-down configuration pretty much sums up post-Corbyn Labour.

Icy and Sot

 

Issac Cordal’s morose concrete figures endured this Summer’s monsoon in the garden and just about maintained their social distance in a gloomy basement.

 Isaac Cordal

 

Flock was clearly in vogue when the house was last given a decor update as the pattern recurs in several of the installations.  Adam Neate bid for the window blinds and the colour and texture makes a great skin motif in his ghostly portraiture

 

Adam Neate

 

This show exceeded expectations, though that says more about our expectations than the artists involved. The unbalanced capitalisation of the show title exhorts to us to somehow re-connect in these desperate times where isolation is salvation and this show is worth connecting with.  Time is running out though and indeed thanks to covid restrictions tickets are very limited.

All photos: Dave Stuart

Adam Neate - Dimensionalism

5 Sep - 18 October

Elms Lester Paint Rooms
Flitcroft Street
Covent Garden
London WC2H 8DH

all photos: NoLionsInEngland



Sometimes Graffoto is blown away by an exhibition to which the street art epithet has only a distant relevance but it is still worth sharing the excitement. In the case of Adam Neate, the street art pedigree is undoubted, Adam was one of the pioneers of London’s street art culture but regrettably in 10 years of obsessing over street art we have never actually found a piece of street art by Adam Neate. And that includes lonely hours late into the night driving around North London on a wild goose chase when he deposited 1,000 screen printed portraits all over London in 2008.




Exhibitions by Adam Neate at Elms Lester have always plotted and commemorated a timeline through his progress and development. We have seen the portraits, the introduction of movement, the playing with light, shadow, colour, the 3D “Dimensionalism”, the use of perspex. This show is no different as we now see Adam taking up the use of wood and a return to painting, playing with the texture of the paint itself.

Tilting shapes cut into sheets of wood provides Adam Neate with a new means to explore depth and relief in a single sheet. The tilts and steps between adjacent layers of wood provide depth and shadows in a lot of the art in this show. The effect is pulled off most spectacularly in “The Horse Race” with elements such as the reins in the rider’s hands actually are the cuts between adjacent panels of wood and the legs rising out of the plane of the image create their own shadow. Craftsmanship here has been raised to the level where, as we understand it, Neate can achieve these contrasts of depth using just one single cut piece of wood, nothing added, nothing taken away apart from a pile of sawdust. From a distance (and when viewed in an online picture) the image takes on the appearance of a flat painting, for full impact get close enough to smell the jockey sweat.


The Horse Race


As well as manipulating the cut sheets of wood, Adam Neate has also experimented with groves incised into the wood. In The Concert Pianist the view is over the shoulder of the player, across the piano towards the auditorium. Humanity is created by grooves in the wood in the background and also the planks on the stage are grooves cut into a single piece. The theatre curtain hangs slightly proud of the scene while the piano is a masterpiece of wood shaping and painting, check out the painted reflection of the piano keys.


The Concert Pianist


The most breathtaking piece in this series is “The Ship Of Fools”, three men in a tub assailed by a storm bail their boat. One suicidal mariner is penetrating holes into the side of the vessel to let the water out, there is some technical merit to this, it would reduce what salty sea dogs refer to as the “free surface effect”, true. A land lubber in the background vomits into a bucket while in the foreground someone frantically bails. Unconcerned by the elements and the looming tragedy a pair of seagulls circle overhead, these are cut shapes in the wood whose edges are painted white and as you move around the image, you see flashes of darkness and white just as you would glancing at real seagulls banking and swooping overhead. Cut wood surface rise and fall out of the plane of the painting while paint and lacquers play with the light and shadows. Through these details Neate weaves his magic.


The Ship Of Fools



The Ship Of Fools (detail)


Friends of this blog have raved about another image, the pretty big (we love this kind of special art language) “The Brothers”. Personally I found this image rather static and cartoonish, it seems to cry out for the missing dynamism of a serious sibling squabble, it lacks that trademark movement.


The Brothers


12 years ago, Adam Neate was painting portraits on cardboard which he left in doorways across East London. It disappeared from the indoor art about 4 years ago but Neate has gone back to working with cardboard in a bright summery series of cardboard images inspired by the seaside. As well as following up with tilted constructed planes like in the wood pieces, Neate has pursued a distinctly cubist representation of figures and clothing. Contemporary narcissism is captured in the pre-occupation of the bathing beauties taking selfies on their phone, the image on the phone screen combining flesh and bikini tops.


Selfie


A trio of small red portraits routered in wood with their blurry, painted portrait edges hark back to Neate’s focus on representing movement.


Red Portrait(s)


Over the years the rewards garnered by his talent have priced his gallery works well out of the reach of mere mortals but Adam is currently rectifying that with some very attractively (suicidally!) priced editioned dimensional pieces. All three, The Hug (sold out), The Cyclist and London Bridge are exhibited and in the case of the first two the originals are also on display. London Bridge captures a scene of grim business men commuting across London Bridge, their dark impressionist faces are in the classic Neate vein but the extraordinary element is the holographic ties they are wearing. Interestingly the gallery has two "London bridge" on display and the difference between the one displayed under natural daylight and the one under artificial gallery light (often referred to as “a light”) is quite dramatic.


London Bridge



The Cyclist (Originals)

Most art appears better in the flesh than in small images on a cell phone but in this case, only real life lets you differentiate between what is shadow and what is paint and to see how different points of view dramatically affect the perspective between the different layers. No amount of photography when reduced to blog friendly resolution can convey Adam Neate’s wide ranging exploration of the textures and finishes of paint that he has applied to the various surfaces. Until Graffoto’s web enabled holographic feel-o-vision gains wider use and some semblance of technological adequacy, you will for the time being have to get along and see for yourself.

Adam Neate - Dimensional Paintings

To 29 Oct 2011

Elms Lester Painting Rooms
1-3-5 Flitcroft St,
London, WC2H 8DH

All photos by nolionsinEngland



Deep joy, another Adam Neate collection of new art at Elms Lester and another guided tour by gallerist Paul Jones. This is, I think, the third Adam Neate talk by Paul Jones I’ve had the pleasure of lurking at. Paul Jones describes Neate’s new works in terms of linear self-informing progression, each step forward a consequence of the previous stride. With the aid of a few pics, here is what stuck in the memory about this latest display, so no guarantee regarding accuracy.




Neate continues with the figurative subject matter and 3D compositions. The 3D Perspex portraits retain the motion effects, the play with shadows and the cubist approach to representation through distorted surfaces and edges. The new aspect in the Perspex pieces is the introduction of mirrored perspex to throw the ambient light around the image with a greater degree of control. The stand out piece is Home Entertainment. Tremendous attention to detail surrounds the shadows cast by the standard lamp in the room. The picture incorporates photographs of both the artist and his wife, seemingly a one off multi-media effect the narrative appears to be that they have just taken a bath and the artist is viewing an image of his wife on the TV screen. I hope I understood that correctly!


Home Entertainment


What also can’t be seen in the photo is that the curtains to the right are actually 3D louvers and Neate has used fibre optics to create pin points of light outside the window representing stars


Home Entertainment


Neate retains his light, whimsical touch celebrating innocent love, classical beauty, shining lights and celestial choirs. Only kidding. This next piece is called No Way Out,, a man seeks solace in the bottle as relief from problems with his marriage and job. Exit is an organisation for promoting the early killing of old people or something. The composition is hugely 3D with every twist and trim of the Perspex sheets and tubes significant in defining a limb, a gesture or piece of fabric


No Way Out


Neate has now set himself the challenge of proving himself a true painter by translating his kinetic layered portraits back to canvas. In this study, Neate has built up the layers to achieve a considerable relief effect from the surface of the canvas.




One of the more interesting developments is portrayed by gallerist Paul as being accidental or intuitive, you decide. Having painted a figure of a man naked from the nips up and reflected at length upon what he saw on the canvas, Neate one day just picked up a Stanley knife and slashed at the canvas. The gaping slashes revealed a further layer or dimension within the canvas for him to play with. The slashes suggest perhaps ribs inside or maybe the self-harming consequence of listening too much to The Horrors.




From the discovery of using the effect of opening up the surface of the canvas, Neate now exploits the plane of the canvas, explores into the depth of the canvas and with the addition of collaged objects reaches out of the surface of the canvas into the room space. This has now come to be termed the “dimensional painting”, playing with layers. In the drive through composition, although it may not seem so from the photo, Neate has created layers on the surface of the canvas with cut penetrations and additional inserts. The driver is collecting the fizzies from a hatch cut into the canvas, and those drinks are 3 dimensional, his wife has lowered a drinks tray which also is an additional layer sitting proud of the canvas plane, the folds in the boy’s teeshirt in the back is a 2D replica of the way Neate represents clothing folds in 3D using winding perpsex tubing. The driver married the bearded lady, no, sorry, that’s the shadow.




Although not described by Paul Jones this way, it seems Neate follows a sort of three steps forward one step back iterative process in which after some experimentation with new stuff he goes back to an earlier technique to see if what he has learned affects the content or result from earlier ways of working. So in this show alongside the dimensional perspex painting we see a recent old style cardboard portrait.




Perhaps the most radically different “painting” in this show is a stretched primed canvas which Neate has attacked with the Stanley knife and through the slashes, twists and folds has assembled a recognisably Neate-esque figure, the stretched canvas has been transformed into a sculpture contained cleverly within the original stretcher. Brilliant and stunning. For this piece, the position of the lighting is critical to create the fall of shadows within the piece that define nose, eyes, mouth in a way Neate has made his signature. The staging of this item as the sole focal point in a plain white corridor was beautiful.




Neate defines himself as a painter though and to be honest the patter got slightly knotted when the question 'why is this one painting and not sculpture was thrown from the floor.




lady NoLions thought there was something KKK sinister in this one.

The link across the various mediums used in this collection is the idea of layering, The phrase “Dimensional Painting” feels like it is almost an effort to define a new “new school”, lets hope that a less clumsy description evolves. Jones is charmingly evangelical on the subject of Neate’s work, he clearly regards Neate as the most complete and most significant painter of his generation, drawing analogies with great modern painters including Lucien Freud, Warhol, Cubists and impressionists. I’m easily persuaded based on the work in this show and the clear growth through the series of Elms Lester shows over the past four years.

More from Mr Neate

Blown away. . .and I still havent been to see it in the flesh. Am scared I'll be speechless afterwards so I'll post these up now!

Adam Neate

I really cant wait to see this show in the flesh. The stories have already been told far and wide of how ridiculous the buy to sell market is flooding the street art (call it what you want) market. Where will it all end? (and I really stopped caring for being mad about chasing the next big print a long long time ago (when the price rose above £250 a pop - but it's a phase a lot of us have all gone through)

All we will really know is that the real up turn in all of this didn't start with Banksy anymore. . .Mr Neate is pissing all over him from a great height.

So in honour of him, and by rather bizarre coincidence (posted spot on at 2am) I hadn't seen this print until searching for it now but knew the title and decided to come and post something about the show. I searched and found Elms Lesters - the gallery where it's at

http://www.elmslesters.co.uk/

And found this :

2am BLOG

PAINTINGS, POTS and PRINTS

A one man show by ADAM NEATE

Featuring original paintings, an exclusive collection of original handthrown stoneware and porcelain ceramics made in collaboration with critically acclaimed British studio-potter DAN KELLY and new limited edition prints. **WHICH SOLD OUT YESTERDAY....DOH!**

The second element of the exhibition, 'POTS', is the result of months of collaboration between Adam and Internationally renown British potter, DAN KELLY.

August 3rd - 25th 2007

Opening hours: Tuesday - Saturday 12 - 6pm

Thursdays 'til 9pm