Serene in Strength, 2012, oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in.
Please check out the online exhibition I curated of Dale McNeil's new work on Curating Contemporary, a website run by Brian Edmonds and dedicated to hosting artist-curated exhibitions on a rotating monthly basis.
View the exhibition here.
Below is my essay on McNeil's work:
Resplendent Rubble
Paul Behnke
Thou
shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything
that is in Heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the
water under the earth.
KJV, Exodus, 20.4
Abstraction, at its core, stems
from an unease with the physical world and the way it is portrayed. An extreme asceticism
lies at its heart. It is dissatisfied with the false idols of representation.
Certain abstract painters are
more conscious of this origin. They may
endeavor to shed trappings and to strip from their art all that is unnecessary-
all that is not pure.
* * *
Today, a painter who draws a
line between nature and image, who views art- making as a vocation and who wishes
for an ideal, even when one is not possible, seems hopelessly out of step with
current trends. But there are painters still at work who value the attitudes of
Rouault, Pinkham Ryder, DeFeo, and Redon.
Dale McNeil is such a
painter. While his current body of work makes use of symbol and structure, it
continually chafes at and denies these artifices of representation as false and
unclear, untrue and muddled.
* * *
McNeil begins a painting
with a seminal symbol, so long in use that it has become embedded in the universal
unconsciousness. These familiar symbols
are explored like ruins, through the layering of paint and scraping it
away. With the use of transparent veils,
and clots of paint and medium, these symbols are picked apart, demolished and
built again into a new order. McNeil pushes beyond the original symbol in his
search for meaning.
The resulting paintings transcend
any fumbled mining for a modernist grail. Creation is a denial of life’s
imperfection. McNeil’s crusting of marks and pigment, obfuscated form, and
murky veils deny the inadequate meaning of the original symbol. Left is a
record of a grand search that mixes human frailty and denial of the ideal, even
as an ideal is sought. Resplendent
rubble is left.
In the end, the greatest
strength of McNeil’s paintings is this fleeting glimpse of the sacred.
Dale McNeil
Order Manifest
curated by Paul Behnke
January 7 - February 7, 2013
Curating Contemporary
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