calendario eventi  :: 

X

24/2/2000

Neal Tait

White Cube, London

We are pleased to announce an exhibition at White Cube of London based artist Neal Tait. The exhibition will include a series of paintings that each depict an individual head. Tait's paintings have a kind of blankness that reflects both a fascination with an image and yet denies it. His subjects whether individuals, houses, or makeshift constructions feel abstracted, they are like visual objects that manage to both distil experience and discharge atmosphere.

Tait describes how a person, a photograph or a newspaper cutting can be the catalyst for a painting, but that the individuals are discovered through the painting process. There is a point where they become their own things, a kind of 'event' that happens in all the paintings. The figures somehow appear and resolve so that they could be no other way.

Tait's subjects are nomadic and self-contained. Most distinctive about them is the way the subjects avert their eyes and seem unavailable, refusing the gaze of the viewer. As a group they share something of August Sander's paired down typologies of individuals. Impassive, irreducibly particular and yet pointing to something shared. Tait's characters also have a 'sealed-in-ness', that recalls the onscreen 'closedness' of characters in Fassbinder films. The people on the periphery, the detritus, the overlooked and shadowy.

In these paintings mood and atmosphere are sometimes conveyed through colour - there are green, yellow and blue faces. In many, an individual's features are reduced and schematic appearing found and culled through memory. Other images appear more naturalistic. In some the features seem variously bleached out or latent beneath a mask-like layer of translucent paint, not yet having emerged into full view. The combination of grey / green pallor and dark eye sockets in one of the paintings gives the impression of a death-like mask rather than a living presence, while in another the hood of a sports jacket appears like a gothic cowl.

At a car boot sale Tait found a photograph of a girl with her mouth open that provided the starting point for the above image. He made a drawing from the photograph and used that to paint from. Photographic images are 'fast, liquid and fluid', made for easy consumption and rapid exchange. For Tait, the drawing is the first intervention, he then introduces 'dumb and inert paint' to slow down the whole process, making the visual heavier, more physical, thereby allowing for a 'slow looking time'.

Paintings by Neal Tait will be presented by Jay Jopling at White Cube
44 Duke Street
St. James's
London SW1 6DD
For further information please contact Annushka Shani or Honey Luard on 020 7930 5373.

stampa

permanent link