ARTIST RATHER THAN FIGURAL REALISM

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IDIOMATIC COLOR / A REQUIREMENT OF THE ARTIST RATHER THAN FIGURAL REALISM

NERI’S ACTIVITIES AS A PAINTER before the sculpted form and his idiomatic colorism are both distinctive traits, and we can now see him as a builder who paints and a painter who builds. Although he does not paint every gure, he has been putting color on his sculpture, on plaster, bronze, and marble, throughout his career. The practice would achieve something like culmination in the Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada relief series that began in the mid-1980s. In these works, life-sized standing or kneeling gures are incorporated into large plaster walls whose surfaces are themselves inscribed and painted. They are relief sculptures, to be sure, but descriptive terms such as “painted sculpture” or “sculptural painting” are inadequate. In their wake, as if the demands of the project had conferred upon him an absolute freedom, his subsequent use of paint would attain a visual poetry of often exquisite beauty. Indeed, nothing resembling the spread of Neri’s painted gures can be found in the work of his immediate predecessors, and nowhere else in contemporary American art. Thus Neri found a means with which to surmount habituated ways of seeing the differences between these mediums, differences that still shadowed the art world during his early career, an obstacle he found needlessly divisive and nally pointless.

198. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 1997

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Painted sculpture was nothing new in modern art, of course, and would be common by the 1960s, in nonobjective sculpture especially, but those sculptors shied away from obvious associations with the depictive loyalties of realism. Giacometti added paint to some of his plaster gures near the end of his life, but his interest in sculptural color seems to have been just getting underway, and the application of black lines and forthright primary hues does not feel fully realized sculpturally. Here, then, Neri makes his advance, successfully extending the communicability of the standing female gure without relying on descriptive color and its narrative obligations. Or: Neri’s color refers to the requirements of the artist rather than the requirements of gural realism, and his achievement emerges from the skill and originality with which he integrates his gural naturalism with a highly evolved color sense and a level of painterly gesture that show a comprehensive understanding of the most advanced art of the period of his emergence. Thus he uni es two ostensibly disparate media with a visual logic that never slips into material or conceptual discord. The tone of the work is, indeed, speci c to him.

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 199. Caryatid I (Cast 1/4), 2008 Private Collection

200–201. Seated Figure Maquette, 2007 Private Collection

202–203. Torso (Cast AP), 1978 Private Collection

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204. Seated Girl II (Bather), 1963 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

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Some interpreters have seen Neri as an abstract expressionist sculptor for whom paint simply extended his way of working with the plaster surface, but this is too mechanistic a reading. From the start, he embraced paint as another component of his visual vocabulary, as important to him as any of his other visual means, and over time he has used color to enhance the latent ambiguities and nuanced speaking capacity of the reiterative, serial form. In practice, the visual effects of color on the gures are themselves enigmatic, compelling, evocative, but dif cult to articulate or explain easily: although paint can instigate and/or call attention to the fundamental visual operations that occur on a volumetric form, including its surface textures and the interaction of its constituent elements, Neri never treated color in a strictly functional way. It is functional, and then it does something else.

To the extent that color can be approached as a source of narrative, the narrative, once again, is interior to the artist, and therefore resistant to external reference or summary interpretation. The ef ciency with which Neri’s color refutes cognitive reading as a reliable or self-contained approach to his gures can also be taken, perhaps, as an admission of the limits of the eye as a source of information about the world and its meanings, or at the very least, it admits that the eye is not the nal arbiter of the real. Better that we dream as we stand before the work. Neri’s color requests that we do so.

Some hues undoubtedly have associations in the artist’s memory — the bright reds, yellows, and blacks, for instance, could derive from the lavish hues of vernacular art or processional statuary — while the bold reds may refer in a general way to blood, the force of life, the sangre brava of music and dance. Or not. One is as likely as another. In the studio, Neri saw no inherent divisions between genres, or even between colors. Such distinctions are imposed from without by criticism, theory, and precedent. Art does not need them. So Neri invents. Because his color always exists outside the realm of familiar modes of representation the gure does not resemble anything we might otherwise see or imagine as a “real” being in the world. Neri’s combinative re exes direct us past the physical and sculptural alone, back in the direction of the psyche of the maker, and as a colorist, he has learned to produce effects at once personal and poetic, often through the use of unusual or unexpected mixtures and

combinations, giving the painted gures — the bronze editions especially — a kind of unaffected grandeur. Such work asks that we rely on our imaginative resources — also poetic in essence — which will carry us into a substantially widened eld of response.

With the rst full-sized gures of 1957 and 1958, Neri handled paint in a loose, energetic, but organizational way, placing it as if on a canvas for the purpose of moving the eye around the work, or to focus attention on particular areas of the form. Clearly, however, he recognized the greater possibilities for

LEFT/RIGHT 205. Female Torso III [Untitled Torso III], 1960 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis 206. Female Torso II [Untitled Torso II], 1960 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

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sculptural color almost immediately, and so he did not tarry for long in this rather schematic mode of application. He wanted to press his colors harder still, and after the early 1970s, paint exists more completely in terms of its visual properties — the complex color relationships, intricate layering and glazing effects, and the shifting qualities of illumination. It is lyric color, and as the years passed, Neri learned to use this aspect of his vocabulary with increasing skill.

During the late 1970s — as an example of the thoroughness with which he conducts his research — Neri began mixing dry pigment into his wet plaster as he built, producing works that recall Marini’s use of surface tints as an evocation of the abraded surfaces of old polychrome gures. Here, colors are added like tinctures into the plaster itself, and they tend to be quite soft, Indian reds, serene yellows, and dovelike grays that create an even body tone. These hues enabled Neri to study the ways in which opaque, all-over color is seen in

OPPOSITE 207. Two Figures (Bather Series), 1964 Private Collection

LEFT/RIGHT 208. Seated Female Figure III, 1979 Private Collection

209. Seated Female Figure IV, 1979 The Oakland Museum of California

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210. Blue Blond, 1979 Private Collection

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a variety of spatial settings and conditions, and how it interacts with light. Again, he is interested chie y in clarifying by every possible means the articulation of the gure, its ability to express, and how its expression is affected by the subtly altered appearance of the plaster as a eld/surface. As a comparison, the surfaces of Marini's Pomonas also tend to be quite calm, and their mild color, as soft as a whisper, enhances their atmospheric silence and formal balance; but they have a thematic component, as well, as the artist contemplates the fragility of any artistic reconciliation in a historical period typi ed by imbalance, dysfunction, and violence of every sort.

For Neri, then, color — regardless of its particular mode of application — is another legible gesture upon the form, orchestrated in conjunction with his surface markings. Just as he has taken up many kinds of mark-making tools for the purpose of varying appearance and defeating surface re nement, his use of color generates tension with the form on which it appears. The colors can be unusual, striking, at times declarative, at times beautiful, at times unsettling or garish, disruptive, with the intention of upsetting assumptions regarding what the gure ought to be, or how it should look, without upsetting the form of the gure itself. They may attain a feeling of harmony, or not. They may soothe, or not. They may delight the eye, or not. They may arouse, or not. But the colors are never static.

LEFT/RIGHT 211. Seated Figure Study No. 28, 1981 212. Seated Figure Study No. 31, 1981 213. Seated Figure Study No. 30, 1981 Bound in the artists’ book Tristezas/Songs of Sadness; Yale University Art Gallery

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214–215. Standing Figure No. 3 (Cast AP-II), 1980; Painted 1992 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 216–217. Isla Negra Series I (Cast AP), 1989; Cast 1993; Patina 2016

218. Catun No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1986; Cast 2003; Patina 2016

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During the 1980s, Neri also began painting the bronze editions of his gures, which required that he switch from oil or water-based media to enamels — a medium he had used years earlier on some of his rst plaster gures. He approached metal much as he had approached plaster, treating it as a surface — not, that is, as a “precious” art material — but here the surface is impermeable, re ective, the opposite of plaster, which remains an aqueous medium at heart. As always, Neri wants to test materials, in order to discover how he can use them to extend his expressive means. A patina may be applied to the bronze before he paints, giving it a surface tone, and the enamel then lies “on” the surface like a lm or a skin, an effect that Neri may modulate by applying some of his paint with tools such as whisk brooms or bundled twigs, or by layering many thin glazes (as with the surface treatment he calls Alborada, layers of white paint and yellow glaze, which emphasizes surface textures and gesture and enhances the natural glow of the bronze). Such color can have an effect of modesty, like a veil draped over the gural “body,” and although the paint does not produce a “skin color” or “ esh tone,” nor does it disguise the material personality of metal, it will alter our perception of the gure as a form in space.

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LEFT/RIGHT 219. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 1/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection

220. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 4/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection

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For Neri, paint has its own beauty, and he loves its sensuousness, its uidity, every aspect of the application process, all the endless prospects entailed in mixing, combining, and collocating hues. But it is not an end in itself, nor is Neri using it to simply counteract common modes of conveying content through the motif. Color is always asked to press the communicability of the gure in some way. If his seemingly arbitrary, non-descriptive, or intensely poetic color depersonalizes the model as the psychological basis of the gure, it utterly personalizes Neri’s investiture in the form. If he wishes to convey a narrative — and surely he does — the narrative is his own, with the gure as a document of his engagement with the model and pose.

Although color is not only a visual experience in Neri’s work — reception tends to be more fully physical — our visual re exes will soon be set in motion by the vacillation between sculptural and painterly seeing. Needless to say, Neri’s color assures that we never mistake his gures for real human beings, and yet, because their formal basis is naturalistic, a decidedly human reality comes forth from them. Or: paint is among the means with which Neri asserts its sculptural identity as an (art) object whose origins lie in the humanity of both artist and model and can never be entirely separated from them. All such effects also tend to destabilize the potential for summary interpretations of gural meaning. The painted gure enters the world of objects, seeking a place among

LEFT/RIGHT 221. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 2/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Private Collection

222. Seated Woman [Squatting Woman] (Cast 3/4), 1981; Cast 1982 Yale University Art Gallery

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us, in our space, where we nd that its operations are vividly distinguished from those of the two-dimensional gure, whose home is on the canvas, in a “space” fashioned by the painter for its habitation. Neri’s color is never set to the task of bringing the sculpted gure closer to the circumstances of the narrative canvas.

On the other hand, paint has enabled Neri to challenge the compliance with which we tend to accept the material differences between genres as irreconcilable. In its ability to overcome the compartmentalizing of genres, his painted gure, at its most effective, frees itself from its speci c past as a medium/genre/ motif and, indeed, its past as an art-historical tradition. Yet the motif belongs to history, is inextricable from it, and so the painted gure discovers fresh ways of participating in a free discourse with that past and that tradition, and with the present.

223–225. Annunciation No. 1 (Cast 3/4), 1982; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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