Refuse, Relic, Replica

Lexi Lee Sullivan

Neil Gall is an artist who balances the profound with the absurd in works that buzz with art historical reference. Over the course of his nearly 30-year practice, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. Working on paper and on canvas, he translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black pvc tape – to an unsettling and sometimes erotic effect. If painting was his first love and wedded partner, drawing is his lover. It has become increasingly important to his practice over the last 12 years, and taken up with a fierce dedication since 2016. The groups of recent drawings radiate with an intensity that demands our attention, and places a primacy on a reading of his drawn works to date.

The modern critic who belittles all representational concerns, because he sees them only as solved problems, underrates their power to inflame the artist’s mind and to intensify his vision and his touch.1

Leo Steinberg

Gall works representationally. He shapes, wraps, bundles, cuts, glues and fashions small-scale models from everyday materials like tape, coloured paper and garden wire that are then staged, photographed and either drawn or painted larger than life with a startling verisimilitude. Unlike Thomas Demand or Yamini Nayar, who destroy their sculptural constructions once their likeness has been captured, Gall keeps his models scattered around the studio, lying in wait for their next iteration. As such, his practice cannot be successfully charted as a progressive line, but is perhaps better visually understood as an everexpanding Venn diagram, continuously circling back and looping forward, overlapping and complicating the former with the latter. It is this sustained mining of subjects and ideas – the unsolved problems – in Gall’s drawn work that continues to push representation forward.

It seems fitting to begin with the recent N.O.G drawings (Studio), (Staring Back), (Moving Around) and (Artist Reflected) (all 2016 –17) that in many ways represent a new line of enquiry for Gall. In this work Gall has adopted the humble silver-foil card, purchased at a local craft shop, as his base modelling material. To create the model for these drawings, Gall used a scalpel knife to etch lines into its surface, sometimes cutting fully through the card in a circular shape, and in other areas incising just enough to lift the foil away from its substrate. Symbols have similarly been cut into the dimensional card, a two-way arrow as well as a stylised suture, with the letters J, O, P running across the top of the composition and N, O, G across the bottom. In this way he has created a series of irregularly angled mirrored surfaces that reflect their surroundings. As such, the resultant N.O.G drawings function as self-portraits, capturing the artist’s own reflection in their colourful prisms as well as a number of his paintings, seen in the glowing yellow and fleshy pink tones of Portal (2016). N.O.G ’s illusionistic references multiply when considered in relation to the master of allusion, and a specific inspiration for this work, Jasper Johns.

A stylistic chameleon, Johns has included shadowed gestures and sometimes even painted overtures to his admiration of nineteenth-century American trompe-l’oeil painters, John Frederick Peto and William Harnett, in his drawn and painted work. 2 In more introspective paintings like Ventriloquist (1983), Johns makes reference to Peto’s legacy and to paintings like The Cup We All Race 4 (c.1900), a photorealist depiction of a battered silver cup hanging by its handle on a green cabinet door with incised title, by painting a screen of suspended cups and vessels. 3 He also harkens more generally to ideas of visual perception in his depiction of the Rubin vase and by appropriating a signature trope of trompe-l’oeil painters.4 Like Peto’s drawing pins, or the nail in many trompe-l’oeil paintings, the tabs of tape function as a hyperrealistic device securing two-dimensional bits of paper. Symbols of illusionistic representation, the tape, pins and nails are visual dares to their viewers, to come closer and investigate the ‘real’.