9 THE FIGURE IN RELIEF

THE FIGURE IN RELIEF9

DURING THE MID-1980S, Neri began building large-scale sculptures based on the integration of his plaster gures with a materially substantial vertical ground, a format that evoked the relief carvings and architectural friezes of antiquity. Although he had done something remarkable, his accomplishment was not immediately apparent. At that moment, he had been building from the gure for more than twenty years and was identi ed with the freestanding female form. Although the single gures had indeed provided an exemplary document with which to record Neri’s struggle for self-description and self-authentication, less obvious at the time was the amount of art-historical knowledge that owed into their construction, and the degree to which such utterly modern forms opened themselves to a nuanced play of these kinds of associations. The life-sized relief works represented a major advance in both the application and expansion of these aspects of Neri’s practice, but given the ef cacy of his single standing gures, their clarity, their reliability, and the ease with which they accommodated his invention, the appearance of large relief works in plaster seemed sudden, unexpected, digressive, a kind of aside.

Some of the reliefs were exhibited in the late 1980s. As reviews at the time indicate, they were generally taken at face value, as though Neri had done little more than place his gure against, and partly absorbed into, fractured, irregularly

226. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1985

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LEFT/RIGHT 227. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XI, 1984 228. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/ Escalieta Study No. 10], 1987 Private Collection

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shaped walls: sculpture of imposing presence, yes, but a variation on an otherwise familiar form. Because Neri made no effort to interpret this work publically, the relief format gave the impression of being a material rather than thematic extension of his gural imagination. Its lively, sophisticated play of referential and inferential indices, so evident to us now, generated little critical excitement, and because the series were never shown in their entirety at the time they were made, the ingenuity and sheer breadth of their thematic conjugations remained hidden. The decade drifted to a close, and the reliefs would not be shown again for many years.

Our interest now lies precisely with the elements then unapparent: (1) the intricate, fully realized relationships among the reliefs themselves, carefully developed within webs of formal and poetic information that drew them from their isolation as individual entities and onto a ground of familial intimacy; (2) the uent conjunction of inter-textual episodes that mark them as a purposeful, fully uni ed body of work; (3) the various ways in which the reliefs advanced and solidi ed ideas that had been emerging in Neri’s drawings and paintings during the prior decade; and (4) the underlying relationship between the reliefs and Neri’s single gures, precisely the eld in which we uncover his profound understanding of the history and the traditions of the sculpted gure, and their formal absorption into an unequivocally contemporary sculptural language. We can nally acknowledge the true value of these series to the artist. Not only do they represent a pinnacle in his career, they are a pinnacle in postwar American gurative sculpture, and in postwar sculpture generally.

As an architectural format linked by its gural components to Neri’s previous work and, at the same time, in ected by its various historical af liations, the reliefs provided the sculptor with a durable foundation for the release of immense amounts of personal information into his constructive process. This in turn would enable him to instate a complete, remarkably rich emotional environment as the comprehensive effect of the work itself, one that draws on a past synthesized into, and through, the artist’s own hands, as personalized narrative material readily available to his use in the present. As the relief series continued to develop, Neri would begin applying atmospheric color with a level of re nement well beyond that of his previous work, which led him to an

229. Arcos de Geso [Carrara IV], 1984 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 230. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IV, 1984 Yale University Art Gallery 231. Arcos de Geso Study No. 4 (Diptych), 1984 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum

BELOW 232. Arcos de Geso Study [Amal No. 4] (Diptych), 1984 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

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LEFT/RIGHT 233. Arcos de Geso II, 1985–89 Private Collection

234. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette V, 1984

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235. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast 1986 Private Collection

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 236. Arcos de Geso V, 1985 Yale University Art Gallery 237. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Patina 2016

BELOW 238. Mujer Pegada Series No. 1 (Cast AP), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006 Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

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unusually poetic mode of gural building, not entirely new to his work, certainly, yet rarely stated as openly, or with such con dence and depth.

The origins of meaning and sculptural presence in Neri’s work have always been located in the making process, and in this context, too — the context of the studio — the relief format was a huge advance. As a physically expansive structure, its capacity to absorb a tremendous amount of sculptural information would offer him tremendous potential for formal variability and complexity. Put simply, the relief enlarged his eld — the surfaces available to the mobile, building hand — by enabling him to weave laments of personal, cultural, and historical detail as they passed back and forth over both the sculpted body and the wall of the relief itself. Neri had done something similar with the single standing forms, but as full-sized, naturalistic gures that occupy our space, with us, and “like” us in appearance, they inevitably remind us of ourselves, as the artist intends. The relief changed all that. It was a different kind of object, and its habitation of space required more of the viewer, too.

Let us pause to de ne the scope of the relief project. By the end of the 1980s, the format had coalesced into four series: the bronze Arcos de Geso and Mujer Pegada, titles that, in these series, refer to casts of the Arcos de Geso plasters; and the Maha series. Although the expense of production meant that the bronze editions often required periods of several years or more to complete, nine of the full-scale plaster reliefs were eventually cast, and these were either painted by the artist or given a patina at the foundry, recreating them as unique works. Maquettes accompanying each of the series were also cast and subject to additional nishes.

While the Mujer Pegada bronzes and the Arcos de Geso plasters can be regarded as both individually identical forms and parallel series, Neri comes to each material as a paint ground, and with this in mind, they generate very different effects. Bronze has an adamant surface, and paint tends to adhere to it like a skin. Yet the surfaces permit an inventive application of color: patches, broken layers, paint wiped away to leave networks of color in the surface abrasions, and glazes. The material nature of metal — its impenetrability and dull, re ective gleam — can transform the artist’s color handling into a drama enacted in patterns of texture and shadow, soft-glowing highlights, and solid

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LEFT/RIGHT 239. Omaha No. 5, 1986 Private Collection

240. Omaha No. 4, 1986 Private Collection

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shapes. A silver-nitrate patina, a muted, ghostly chalk-white, or the Alborada patina of white with a yellow glaze, can create an intense, dreamlike silence around the work, especially in low light. Here the gures might be fugitives from the subconscious.

Taken together, the relief series yielded an immense outpouring of work. Each series was preceded and often accompanied by a substantial number of drawings, many of which refer to speci c sculptures. The Arcos de Geso series proved especially fertile in this respect; in the drawings, Neri considers gural positioning, posture, and gesture, sometimes from a lateral perspective, or he studies color possibilities in sculpture already underway. Other drawings — Omaha No. 4; preparatory studies, Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 11] and Pisano No. 48 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs); as well as a large number of untitled sheets — investigate the gure in a position against, close to, or partly subsumed in the relief plane, typically utilizing a language of evocative color.

LEFT/RIGHT 241. Omaha No. 1, 1986 Private Collection

242. Omaha No. 8, 1986 Private Collection

243. Omaha No. 3, 1986 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 244. Pisano No. 48 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Private Collection

245. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/Escalieta Study No. 11], 1987 Private Collection

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 246. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XII, 1984 Private Collection

247. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette X, 1984 Private Collection

BELOW 248. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette VII, 1984

The relief series included a number of maquettes, including three sets of Maha maquettes. One group, done in 1986 and comprised of ten plasters roughly twenty inches in height, is typi ed by a rectangular relief shape and it extends the format of the earlier Mujer Pegada maquettes. The second, eleven stoneware pieces of similar size, was done the same year, during Neri’s residency at the Bemis Project in Omaha; these tend to be irregularly shaped, like broken walls, while the gures, almost notational, molded in urries of thumbprints and indentations, lie outside literal resemblance. They share a kind of ritual urgency with some of their predecessors among the Mujer Pegada maquettes, evoking an archaism emphasized by their earthen surfaces and subdued glazes. The third includes the bronze Maha maquettes, cast from the ceramic and stoneware series.

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ABOVE, LEFT/RIGHT 249. Ree Schonlau, Photographer Bemis Project, Omaha, Nebraska, 1986 250. Maha – Ceramic Relief I, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum

251. Maha – Ceramic Relief II, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum

BELOW, LEFT/RIGHT 252. Maha – Ceramic Relief III, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum

253. Maha – Ceramic Relief IV, 1986; Re-worked 2010 Racine Art Museum

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While he was at Bemis Project, Neri also built six larger Maha stoneware sculptures, each approximately forty-eight inches in height. Although they resemble the life-sized works, at three-quarter scale their articulation of the relationship between parts has particular clarity. Three are still intact. These have been cast, and uniquely painted by the artist. Indeed, many exceptional examples of Neri’s use of bronze as a paint ground are to be found among works of this period: a further selection would include Mujer Pegada Series No. 3 (Cast 2/4), Mujer Pegada Series No. 4 (Cast 3/4), or Arcos de Geso (Cast 4/4). In many of them, Neri applied color in processes of addition and removal, often exposing areas of metal below and creating intricate surface textures. A coloristic atmosphere of age and use emanates from the lacework of incisions, the carved lines and irregular surfaces, marked by broken, fragmented, overlapping, and non-local hues that survive in unexpected pockets, patterns, and combinations — such surfaces have the appearance of old walls, the beauty of seemingly random episodes of color and texture, a cooperative handiwork of time and weather and human encounter.

LEFT/RIGHT 254. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 1 (Cast 2/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis 255. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 256. Maha – Bronze Relief No. 6 (Cast 2/4), 1986; Cast 2006 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

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OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 257. Relief Study No. 15, 1983 Private Collection

258. Mujer Pegada Study [Gustavo No. 11], 1985

BELOW 259. Maha Study – Carrara I, 1984 Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, University of California, Davis

260–261. Mujer Pegada Series No. 5 (Cast 1/4), 1985; Cast 2005

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LEFT/RIGHT 262. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette XIII, 1984–85 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas 263. Arcos de Geso [La Figura/ Isla Negra Study No. 9], 1987 Private Collection

OPPOSITE 264. Arcos de Geso (Diptych) (Cast 4/4), 1985; Cast 2005; Painted 2006

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The plasters were painted, too, though not in the same way. The Arcos de Geso series is, for example, an early instance of Neri’s use of dried pigments mixed into the wet material during construction, a technique that permits the ephemeral volumes of Arcos de Geso VI and Arcos de Geso X.

Although a general history of the sculpted gure had always been crucial to Neri’s sense of the form and its operations — the ubiquity of the upright pose means that his standing gures will naturally seek some level of contact with this past — his interest in art-historical form normally arises from a direct response to individual moments or instances in which he has discovered an af nity, a speci c facet or detail to which he nds himself responsive. They are not arbitrary. Neri’s interest, always, is located in those sculptural moments that continue to communicate humanness, a connectivity with the contemporary present, those properties of gesture and form in which we continue to recognize ourselves, a sculpturally embodied humanity that reaches across and collapses time.

Once Neri has assimilated a form — absorbing it into his hands, initially through his drawing practice — it will eventually nd its way into his building process, though its appearance is idiomatic and not always immediately apparent. It has the ow of speech. But Neri never incorporates historical information as a way of supporting some conceptualization of the gure, or as quotation: as, that is, an associative form af xed to the work for the purpose of bulking out its thematic substances. Neri may not care particularly if its appearance can be identi ed by the viewer. It is information now, distilled into his own idiomatic naturalism as a way of looking at, thinking about, or expressing human gesture that, apart from its other sculptural functions, bears the energy of its human address in, or into, the present.

Neri knows, of course, that the cultural memory of the viewer may intercept an embedded historicized form — that referents will be felt bodily, however altered or personalized by the artist — but he has made a virtue of this situation by refusing to treat it as a problem. The history of the gure is such that a comprehensive “originality” might not even be possible. For Neri, “originality” tends to reach in the direction of “origins,” not toward novelty as such. Or we might say that when he took up the gure, Neri did not go in search of the past,

OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 265. Relief Study No. 3, 1983 Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude; Private Collection

266. Arcos de Geso X, 1985 Yale University Art Gallery

BELOW 267. Relief Study No. 1, 1983 Bound in the artists’ book Ode to a Beautiful Nude; Private Collection

268. Buddha No. 8, 1984 Private Collection

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269. Mary Julia, 1973 Yale University Art Gallery

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but neither, as it turned out, could he entirely elude it. The form inhabits tradition, and is inhabited by it. This is a fact for him. Through his own repetition of address, tradition takes a place among his visual resources, which allows him to turn his imagination in any direction he chooses, toward historical motifs as near to him in time as Degas, Matisse, Giacometti, Marini, Manzù, or Aristide Maillol, and as distant as the Etruscans and the Egyptian dynasties — as well as from his own past, the early plasters in which he tested the use of props, multiple gures, and environmental con gurations, works such as Seated Girl II (Bather) (1963). As Neri knows, there are gural continuities that have never ceased to attract the interest of sculptors; and once again, internalization of form allows him to examine experientially the ways in which a gural past can cooperate with the contemporary form and at the same time, it is a way of insuring that references enter his building process without overwhelming or interrupting the sculptural entity as a ( gurative) whole. Invested meaning ultimately comes from the present, and speaks of present needs and desires.

Intimations of the relief form would appear in Neri’s work at least as early as 1976, in the Emborados series, eighteen drawings absorbed in pictorial issues to which he would give more exhaustive attention in the sculptural walls. The Emborados drawings take up, in a direct way, the peculiar kinds of ambiguities that arise from collisions between spatial representation and its depictive evocations. At rst glance, they might be eld-based abstractions, compositions based on combinations of blocky forms rendered in delicate, transparent watercolor and areas of textured color in pastel, raw pigment, and charcoal. In fact, they emerge from Neri’s long interest in the ancient architectural sites of Mexico and other parts of South America, and their imagery is based on old walls in the towns and villages there. In actuality, then, the Emborados series approaches literal depiction. As a representation of intricate, visually intriguing surfaces, Neri’s broken, irregular, overlapping forms, as well as his patterns, textures, and colors, transform their visual source into sign. It now seems but a short step from the Emborados series to the relief walls, and another to the addition of gures.

Although we can distinguish conceptually between the implied spaces created by open, spacious surfaces (those of the world) and surfaces whose

spatial tropes are intentional and controlled (those of art), in practice, both can be and often are read in much the same way by the perceptual imagination. With the Emborados series, Neri attempts to undo such familiar spatial distinctions by failing to disclose the basis of the imagery: if they are seen solely as artworks, the drawings point toward a well-trodden path of interpretation that, in actuality, bears no connection to their actual genesis. It is an ambiguity that wants to counteract critical assumptions regarding the nature of the image as readily apprehensible.

270. Emborados Series XV (Diptych), 1976 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 271. Mary Julia – Side I, 2001 272. Arcos de Geso VII, 1985

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Neri does something similar in the relief sculptures. These sculptural “walls” never insist on an explicit meaning or af liation, or on any reliable cluster of references. Nor do the titles provide descriptive information that might locate their origins as spaces or sites, or even the artist’s intended effect. At full scale, their material nature is speci c and concrete, and as ostensible “backgrounds” to the gures, their very materiality asserts the ambiguity of their relationship to the gure, spatial or otherwise. Many of the walls from the Arcos de Geso series are marked by an elegant embroidery of linear incisions, as well as intricate patterns of inscriptions, ssures, indentations, breaks, splatters, buttons, depressions, hairline cracks, and the “ghosts” of gures: thus Neri activates and

LEFT/RIGHT 273. Relief Study No. 11, 1983 274. Relief Study No. 12, 1983

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275–276. Mujer Pegada Series No. 3 (Cast 2/4), 1985; Cast 2006 Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University

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enlivens the sculptural surfaces in ways that recall his drawings, and yet, as solid surfaces from which the gures advance physically into our space, their function is not so obvious. With the addition of non-descriptive, often lyrical color — color that speaks on behalf of the artist, autobiographically, and, at the same time, stimulates the viewer’s imagination — the relief here seizes a broad terrain of emotional and/or psychological expressivity.

The Arcos de Geso sculptures are distinguished thematically by the presence of the gure, which occupies (our) space at life size and in three dimensions, a gure whose unmistakable human appeal is excited rather than inhibited by the addition of poetic color. Still, the Emborados series drawings do not simply recede from view at this point. When the gure enters drawings of the same period and family, Neri tends to treat drawn space very much as he treated the spatial wall in the Emborados series — as, that is, readily available to color, but nonspeci c and free of narrative detail. Almost any pictorial setting, however “nonrepresentational,” launches a response that differs from our sense of the solitary gure as a formal vehicle whose gestures bear particular kinds of narrative content. What is this “place” in which the gure nds itself? Why is the gure there? From this perspective, the relief form entails much risk for a contemporary artist, for it necessarily bears traditions of use, meaning, and association, ancient as well as modern, civic as well as religious.

Because the imagery of the Emborados drawings is not perceived in terms of mass, it performs spatially as a matter of course, but, once again, the slippage that occurs around its representational “identity” does not transfer to the relief. Here, mass tends to be perceived as literal, and cannot guarantee a similar kind of reading, even when Neri uses paint to subdue some of its strongest material effects. The relief is a (literal) wall of signs, but rather than denoting spatiality, it displaces (real) space physically and encloses the gure within its assertion of mass. The wall will continue to exert at least some domination over the gure, and because its materiality resists the spatial readings that come so readily to drawing, we cannot quickly grasp the nature of the exchange between the physical and spatial identities of the wall, or between the wall and the gure contained by it. Figure and relief can never be completely separated, must forever coexist, wedded in a kind of eternal unity.

277. Mary Julia, 1999

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278. Arcos de Geso [Pisano No. 53], 1982; Re-worked 1984

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Neri was aware, of course, that the relief walls would ultimately resist spatial readings, even when a relationship with drawing was implied by the proportions of the “ at” surface around the gure. We might say that the relief wall no longer signi es the spatial as such, but instead implements the withdrawal of the dedicated notational spaces of drawing and painting: it forces the work to rst perform sculpturally. Its relationship with the gure is unitary, and if the wall confers meanings on the gure, so, too, does the gure confer meanings on it. Yet the relief, as a ground for the gure, tends to problematize this exchange by materially absorbing potential meanings related to the presence of the gure as a gure, and as it does so, it begins to expand the gure’s physical and conceptual elds.

Such issues do not arise among the single standing gures, which necessarily enter our own space as gures, and when they do, they behave in ways readily comprehensible to us. As a gural environment, the relief mass imparts the impermeability of surface, opacity, and obstructive scale, and even atness cannot simply be accepted as a trait somehow required by the gure as a source or explanation of meaning. It is for this reason that Neri refrains from further literalizing the already literal wall. He does not build the “wall” from brick, which would overly determine interpretation, nor does he add other architectural features.

To the extent that the wall can be perceived as a “background” to the gures, it may of course imply certain common forms of presentation, but even though it provides a perfectly viable structural solution to the real dif culties posed by the combination of material and scale, it is not truly architectural. Its proportions bring to mind a stage, as well, which gives the relief form a certain theatricality that the gures, in spite of their apparent indifference to the performative nature of the tableau, never quite contradict, but this is probably built into the history of the relief. When we encounter a single gure, we are free to circle it, to interrogate its human af liations from our own sense of self; the relief, on the other hand, insists that we position ourselves before it, that we study it from a perspective established by the artist, and because we must account somehow for the wall, our response to the gure as a gure is bound to proceed along different lines.

LEFT/RIGHT 279. Arcos de Geso III (Detail), 1985 Clarinda Carnegie Art Museum 280. Recuerdo Benicia No. 8, 1993 Private Collection

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281. Arcos de Geso I (Diptych), 1985 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW 282. Arcos de Geso Study [Rock No. 48], 1984 283. Arcos de Geso Study [Rock No. 47], 1984

Still, the wall does carry out a number of duties. It is: (1) a material analog to the drawing sheet; (2) a contained, internally integrated structural eld that simultaneously contains and isolates the gures, cloaking them in a mysterious atmosphere of hiddenness or interiority; (3) an enclosure that shelters the gures from the surrounding world; (4) a barrier that prohibits us from seeing “beyond” the gure, whether literally or as interpretation; and (5) a framing device that reorients the gure as a presentational form. Similarly, associations

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generated by the relief as a historical genre establish af liations with (human) time, including its numerous connections to art history and the uses to which the sculptural gure has been submitted in many different periods, cultures, and locations. We soon discover, too, that these networks of association and connection are cooperative. None struggles for dominion, and as they seek each other, we have dif culty extricating them, one from another, as discrete features.

Thus Neri uses the relief to shift the gure from the communicative (freestanding and humanized in open, variable settings) to the dramatic (the historicized genre that situates the form in a controlled setting). Although the dramatic can easily resolve in the direction of arti ce, Neri resists this movement, which further explains why he never added details or props to the wall as a way of setting a stage. By treating the wall as a sculptural entity integrated with the gure and susceptible to his gestures as a builder, Neri’s strict management of visual features yields a closed frame of the privately signi cant and personally symbolic. As effect, this heightens the atmosphere of (personal) ritual as an aspect of the (his) sculpted gure: the relief is a vehicle with which the artist ritualizes, dramatizes, and symbolizes his autobiographical, self-descriptive drives in a manner that is more distinctly presentational than the single gure.

Neri’s decision to work with the relief may also be connected to stone sculptures that he began in 1983, full-sized gures partially submerged in, or appearing to emerge and assume form from the material itself. These had in fact started earlier that year as a sequence of nine maquettes that Neri called the Mujer Pegada series, each a small plaster gure set against a plywood wall. These were shipped to the artist’s studio in Carrara and provided the formal basis for his subsequent Mujer Pegada marbles, which cannot really be called wall or relief works in the fullest sense, not as Neri would develop the format in the large plaster Arcos de Geso reliefs of 1985 and after. The remnant material that constitutes the gural “walls” does not have nearly the same sculptural prominence, and in any case it points toward different inquiries around form and material. Nonetheless, the Mujer Pegada marbles are suf ciently companionable with the relief to suggest a signi cant role in Neri’s subsequent expansion of the wall form in plaster.

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284–286. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Benicia Studio, 1988

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OPPOSITE, LEFT/RIGHT 287. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief I, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 288. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief II, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 289. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief III, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

ABOVE, LEFT/RIGHT 290. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief V, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 291. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VI, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 292. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VII, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

BELOW, LEFT/RIGHT 293. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief VIII, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 294. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IX, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery

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LEFT/RIGHT 295. Mujer Pegada – Maquette for Marble Relief IV, 1983 Yale University Art Gallery 296. Mujer Pegada No. 4, 1985 San Francisco International Airport

OPPOSITE 297. Mujer Pegada No. 8, 1985; Re-worked 2012 Private Collection

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At that point in the 1980s, he was giving a great deal of thought to the nature of stone — its unique properties, as well as the ease with which material and form combined to evoke prior modes of gural sculpture as a valuable site, securely lodged in cultural memory. In essence, the stone carvings blur the gure/ground relationship, and in this sense, are crucial to Neri’s transition from the single gure to the relief. Modernism had challenged the idea that gure and ground are intrinsic to the production of art; this was an especially important issue for painting, as gure and ground became a site of struggle against perspective, the pseudo-science of representation that had satis ed the rationalist instincts ofWestern culture in art since the Renaissance. Though sculpture would not be exempt from these same questions, they were never entirely settled for the gurative sculptor, nor could they be, for the presence of a ground of some kind — even real space — is inevitable.

Neri’s devotion to the single gure tells us that his understanding of ground was de ned largely by his own experience as a body moving through the spaces of the physical world, and as a body engaged in the interconnected procedures entailed in perceiving, looking, touching, learning, thinking, and making. The gure/ground relationship had never been unduly troublesome among the standing gures, insofar as it was conceived in terms of sensible, empirically veri able distinctions as clear as up and down, here and there, this and that. Neri’s work in marble, in which ground was inseparable from the gural body as a loosely columnar, af liate shape, would agitate against old sculptural certainties as partial gure and rough stone vied for the viewer’s interest, with the result that the surrounding space could no longer be regarded as ambient or neutral, as if simply awaiting the arrival of the sculpture into its precincts.

Among the Mujer Pegada marbles, there are instances in which Neri abbreviates the gure to the point that it truly blends into the stone. He then takes another step, chiseling sheets of texture that erode lingering demarcations between material and form to the point that a conventional gure/ground relationship ceases to exist. The gure is now inextricable from its formal integration with the slab — it is a presence — and our perception shifts from the familiar, generally secure procedures of looking to a reliance on a more intuitive kind of perception. This gure passes into the relief sculptures, where

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it will become most apparent among the double gures and silhouettes. It is the form that appears alongside the sculpted gure on Arcos de Geso II and Arcos de Geso VI. It also inhabits some of the Maha – Bronze Relief maquettes, where the “second” gure is either a silhouette — a rough sort of bas-relief related to the contour in Neri’s drawings, raised slightly from the relief surface but essentially at — or a fragmented form that scatters and dissolves as it descends along the relief surface from head to ledge.

Even when the gures seem to come forward from the relief wall to enter our space, and our world, the relief in its entirety continues to ful ll its formal identity as a gure or gures on at surfaces proportionately consistent with those of Neri’s common modes of drawing, and indeed, such explicit sculptural references to the gural occupation of the drawing sheet would seem to con rm that he is assembling a legible relationship between otherwise dissimilar mediums. Although the gure and wall are collaborative, and advance the inherently sculptural issues of visibility, accessibility, and display, their material unity proposes ambiguities, as well. Neri does not simply “place” the gure, or join it “to” the wall, and while the volumetric extension of gure from surface is spatial, the gure belongs to the wall as completely as it belongs to real space.

The contour line, where the “edge” of the gure meets the wall, rarely articulates the gure/ground relationship with the clarity of the artist’s drawings. The line of contact can be more like a smear of material uncertainty. Because Neri never quite de nes its exact nature as a boundary or even as a transitional zone, the line refuses to provide an outright explanation of its duties, or to actualize an explicit role of its own with either the gure or the relief surface; gure and wall are neither exactly one object, nor explicitly two. While the basis of formal connectivity is, once again, material and literal, its literality is simultaneously disallowed as the interpretive basis for a formal relationship. Just the opposite — everything is implication and suggestion.

When the reliefs are inscribed in ways that evoke the artist’s drawings, they maintain a body of recognizable signage that we can link to the drawings, as Neri’s visual grammar slides back and forth between mediums. A fundamental identity will hold, and in this sense, Neri’s handling of the relief as a surface is a

point of junction with the larger body of his work, af rming the relief as an extension of (rather than a digression from) his need for self-telling, the ambition to depict autobiographical content that is by nature incorporative, self-descriptive, and non-narrative, an outpouring of personal detail. In sculpture and drawing alike, the gure remains the constant.

At a scale close to one of Neri’s common drawing formats, the sculptural maquettes seem especially keen to dwell on the exchange between mediums. Their rough, handmade quality, whether in ceramic, stoneware, or cast in bronze, and apparent in Maha – Ceramic Maquette I, seeks the speed and direct contact we associate with drawing, and as a result, the smaller gures have a beguiling individuality, a quality of personality that emerges in contrast with the rhythmic textures of the relief surfaces. Although the maquettes lack the bodily presence of the full-size sculptures, they do display Neri’s translational activities at the level of process, as he explores the intimate permeability of texture and form (in a way that the larger sculptures do not) as a readily apprehensible uni cation of gure and ground. The low-keyed glazes and earthen character of the stoneware maquettes clearly support this effort, as do the plaster surfaces left bare to enforce an association with paper. Additive color can be a factor in the relief sculpture at this scale, but it is a limited one. Neri focuses instead on discovering more about the operation of the gure in this format. In Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IX, for example, he positions two kinds of gures — a frontal and a lateral — into a simultaneously formal and inferential relationship, a con guration he never duplicated at full size. The smaller works answered his inquiries satisfactorily.

In some instances, differentiations are created by formal and textural dissimilarities between the gure and the relief structure. Although the depth of the relief may shift from bottom to top behind the gure, the most common distinctions between gure and ground are textural. When the textures differ in perceptible ways, the gure seems to advance from the wall in a vivid spatial effect. Color or the reduction of gural volume introduces other effects, sometimes blending gure and wall by lessening sensations of gural dimensionality. When Neri uses similar or related textures on both, tightening the proximity of gure and ground, the maquette clearly recalls his drawn gure.

OPPOSITE 298. Mujer Pegada No. 7, 1996 Private Collection

299. Maha – Ceramic Maquette I, 1986 Private Collection

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LEFT/RIGHT 300. Relief Study No. 9, 1983 301. Arcos de Geso Plaster Maquette IX, 1984

OPPOSITE, ABOVE/BELOW 302. Carrara No. 5, 1984

303. Carrara No. 6, 1984 Private Collection

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All such techniques can be transferred to the format at life size, but the maquette scale is more sensitive to nuances of material handling. In both stoneware and bronze, the smaller size soon exposes the way in which an alteration to any single aspect of form affects all others, a tendency that reinforces the logic behind Neri’s limited palette: earth-based pigments give a uniformity to the surface textures, which, in conjunction with scale, means that the entire work can be perceived quickly, an effect that tightens its various internal relationships, while the surfaces, which retain the sandy texture of the clay, tend to unify our perception of light and shadow, weight and density, and by extension, our sense of formal organization. Needless to say, the stoneware maquettes also give high value to their elemental material personality and its association with archaic sculpture.

Among the freestanding gures, gesture is typically ordered around a length of rebar that replicates the human spine as its central structural component, and as an aspect of the form crucial to expressivity of gesture. This is a standard solution to the material necessities of construction in plaster, but at the same time, it connects Neri’s single gures to the history of naturalistic sculpture, all those gures for which the spine is the organizing principle in the handling of communicative form. Once the architectonic function of the spine has been transferred to the relief wall, gural gesture begins to seek other modes of projection. Although the gure never surrenders its naturalism, neither can it ignore the encroachment of the wall as a form. That Neri immediately grasped the sculptural implications of this shift is evidenced by the degree of gural mobilization among the maquettes. Wherever he places the gures, their upright posture accepts and accommodates the actual presence of the wall, and a unique perspective is brought into being by the gure-as-axis, characterized in part by the ability of the wall to defeat the kinds of spatial depths that settle so easily around the single standing gure, or around the drawn gure.

Still, the dimensions of the relief surface cannot quite release their association with the artist’s drawings, and so the comparison needs further adjustment. Because Neri’s drawing elds tend to be nonspeci c, we naturally see them as spatial, while the relief surfaces, objects of physical mass, will not permit an identical response. Depth fails to conform to the familiar logic of pictorial

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304. Pisano No. 17 (Preparatory Drawing for Arcos de Geso Reliefs), 1982 Private Collection

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perspective, and should be recognized as something other than “space,” and other than, or more than, a visual geometry based on width, breadth, and depth. The inscriptive nature of the surface, as Neri uses it, also argues that the relief be regarded as a linguistic format whose decoding must be undertaken through our participation in the artist’s formal language. When two gures appear conjunctively, either in the maquettes or the full-sized reliefs, the absence of explicit narrative between them can be disconcerting. If the material eld unites them metaphorically, they are nonetheless depicted as separate, isolated, self-enclosed. Each may wish simply to be regarded in terms of a speci c kind of occupation of sculptural space, or as a kind of submerged narrative that wishes to return us to a realm of dream in which many stories now become possible.

Lastly, even when the proportions of many of the Mujer Pegada, Maha and Arcos de Geso reliefs echo those of the drawings, the full-sized sculptural reliefs disable direct correspondence. The reliefs are sculpture, unequivocally. Neri inscribes their surfaces with marks that may recollect those of his drawing elds, thus suggesting the potential for a spatial dimension, and for a translation across mediums, yet the marks do not overcome the materiality of the relief itself. This situation recalls an earlier question: can the sculptural object ever reenact the mark-based evocation of an internal spatiality that comes so effortlessly in drawing? Perhaps Neri believed initially that it could, and if this belief informed his drive to test the sculptural relief as an environment for the gure, one that might also have the effect of separating it from an uncontrollable world beyond its borders — only to discover the dif culty, if not the impossibility, of achieving this type of space in plaster or bronze.

Consequently, while the relief form provides the gure with a domain of sorts, a habitat related to and yet separate from its structural function as a ground, it lacks roominess, the felt sensation of a depth that envelops the gure in a eld we perceive as spatially related to and coextensive with our own. Neri’s deployment of sculptural marks can certainly animate the surface, but the material alters the nature of the mark, as it must, transforming to one degree or another its role as a signi er. At full size, the reliefs are monumental enough to maintain the idea that they also be seen as enclosures, contained environments that preserve the gure within.

Here, then, the sculptural surfaces at last surrender the lingering tokens of depictive space. Flatness, as well as mass, opacity, imperviousness, and weight, are now submitted to the organization of the relief as a form metaphorically descriptive of a condition that concerns the gure. Neri has indisputably created a unique kind of environment for it, and in doing so, a unique kind of gure belonging to that site. We nd ourselves asking once again: should the wall be properly regarded as a ground, or as a background, or as an environment, or as form only, privately inscribed and referential? Or is it all of these things, and more? The gure, caught between the freedom of emergence from the wall and submersion into the material that continues to hold it in place, gives a powerful impression of striving to articulate layers of meaning unavailable to the freestanding form alone.

305. M. Lee Fatherree, Photographer Tyler Street Studio, 2006

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The standing gures of the 1970s openly admit Neri’s obsessions with the act and processes of building, with (re)making the body at his own scale. He was invested in the physical demands entailed in making a certain kind of naturalistic gure in plaster, and among the single gures, physical empathy between the viewer and the sculpted human form provided an imaginative eld in which to consider questions related to the gestures of the gure and the artist alike.

OPPOSITE 306–307. Standing Figure I, 1982

308–309. Standing Figure No. 6, 1978 Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas

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LEFT/RIGHT 310–311. Arcos de Geso XI, 1985 University Museums, Iowa State University, Ames

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The relief format stood differently, in a different relationship with the viewer, while the wall enabled Neri to integrate a rich vocabulary of mark and allusion into the work. For that very reason, the relief continues to raise a question of crucial signi cance to the artist: at a time when the nature of the human, as it has been understood at least since the Renaissance, is under duress, can gurative sculpture sustain a meaningful interrogation of selfhood, human purpose and ful llment, individuality of spirit? Will inscriptions from the past assist him in his undertaking, or do they rebut the demands of modernity? Even before the Renaissance, those were among the questions that contributed to the development of a sculpted gure still familiar to us historically. Such questions still cling to the naturalistic gure, and remain all but unavoidable here.

Once Neri began loosening received de nitions related to sculptural formats and genres — de nitions contained and stabilized by the procedures of art history — he scrambled some of the very signi ers that might have guided us through his intention for these works, a strategy that tells us once again how explicitly his thematic concerns remain bound to the currency of the contemporary art world. The gure, again, is the constant, and as it continues to confront the communicable possibilities of the modern form, his visual ideas cross one another like laments within the material body of the reliefs, the tracings of intrinsically synthetic imagination. When these ideas draw upon the art-historical, they assume features so deeply settled in a form that we nd ourselves ranging over references without alighting for long on any single one. We may be barely aware of them, or they may startle us like a suddenly remembered scrap of a dream. To some extent, Neri’s recovery of visual forms — his own as well as those of art-historical origin — represents an act of remembrance, of rescue, resurrection, renewal, preservation — even of liberation, as they burst upon the present — not as reminders of what was but as embodied elements whose vitality refers to that which is most durable in the nature and construction of our humanness.

312. Mary Julia Standing VII, 2009

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