Adam xxxNeatexxx
Artists: Adam Neate
Adam Neate works within a personal contemporary Cubist aesthetic he calls “dimensionalism,” He began his career by leaving his artworks on the street, yet now shows the paintings and assemblages in galleries. With notable influences from Francis Bacon and from Pablo Picasso, his practice combines street art techniques and materials with traditional methods of mark-making and construction. Neate has expressed that “the whole point of being an artist is to be creative and to create, to invent new ways of seeing and showing the world.”
Techniques
Uses aerosols and found objects, he painted on cardboard boxes, which he collected from the street, avoiding the use of canvas because of its cost. His work can have two and three-dimensional qualities, as he tears the material, builds it in layers and staples pieces together, mainly making figurative images, which include self-portraits and portraits of friends.
In an essay in December 2012, art historian Ben Jones wrote "In Adam Neate's most recent work, space itself becomes the medium. The accumulated plasticity of Cubism's two distinct phases has been re-energized by Neate's own distinctive mode: Dimensional Materialism. To get the full multi-dimensional effect, the viewer is asked to activate their own viewing space ...as you move and change vantage point, negative space is held in balance, unleashed, then restrained again. The image resolves itself. Foreground to background shifting, space dissolving, volume folds in, energy pushes out ...Neate's compositions are mapped by sensations of simultaneity. Multiple moments of past experience are elided with a slowed down and extended present moment."