Reflections on the Art of Ruby Neri (With an Additional Note on Mark Rothko)

Ruby Neri: The Wheel of Life (2024)

Soft pastel on paper (182 x 131.5 cm)

massimodecarlo.com

 

 

I. 

 

Last month, a series of wildfires affecting the LA metropolitan area and San Diego County, killed 29 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate, and destroyed more than 18,000 homes and other structures in an area over 57,000 acres in size.

 

Most of  the damage was caused by the two largest fires: the Eaton Fire in Altadena, and the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades; the second and third-most destructive fires in California's history, respectively.

 

Now, whilst I didn't revel in seeing the homes of the rich and famous go up in flames, nor gloat at their suffering, I have to confess I experienced - like many other people - a certain feeling of schadenfreude, because - like many other people - I really do not care for (or about) Hollywood celebrities. 

 

I don't want them to be burnt alive; but neither do I feel much sympathy for those who were able to escape the fires by flying on a private jet to one of their other multi-million dollar homes, pay for a high-end rental property, or check into a suite at the nearest luxury hotel, whilst many other people in far less fortunate circumstances literally found themselves with nowhere to go and desperately seeking temporary accommodation.

 

Obviously, even the super-rich can experience loss and trauma, but they can afford well-paid therapists to help them cope, and so, again, it's hard to feel too sorry for those who, like the actor James Woods, went on TV to bemoan the fact that 'one day you're swimming in the pool and the next day it's all gone'. 

 

Having said that, I was sorry to hear that the LA-based visual artist Ruby Neri, known for her work as a sculptor and painter, was one of those affected by the Southern California wildfires and was thus unable to attend the opening of her first solo exhibition here in London ...

 

 

II. 

 

Ms. Neri uses a wide array of materials to create figurative works that draw inspiration from many different sources, including German Expressionism, street art, and forms of popular culture such as comic books and cartoons [1]. 

 

Whilst a student in the eary-mid 1990s at the San Francisco Art Institute, she and her friends became associated with the so-called 'Mission School' [2]; an art movement that enabled highly-educated, middle-class young people to graffiti the city in the belief that they were sticking it to the Man.    

  

In 1994, Neri moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, and would obtain her Master's of Fine Art from UCLA in 1998. Whilst there, she gradually transitioned away from painting to sculpture, claiming she found the history of the former oppressive.

 

To me that's regrettable, because, from what I've seen of her work, I much prefer her pictures to her 3-dimensional figures made from clay and ceramic. 

 

Certainly when I went yesterday to Neri's new exhibition at the Massimo De Carlo gallery in Mayfair [3], the paintings made a far more favourable impression upon me than the sculptures; particularly the large pastel on paper image entitled 'The Circle of Life', reproduced above, which has the most amazing depth of colour and radiates the sheer joy of movement [4]. 

 

According to the gallery's press release, the exhibition is intended to suggest a surreal garden scene invested with funky feminine vitality and a Shakespearean sensibility. 

 

I can't say I quite picked up on the latter, but I'm happy to acknowledge the former, even if, after a while, it all becomes a bit too much and one rather longs to contemplate the non-funky serenity of a late Rothko - more muted and composed, certainly, but no less vital and, arguably, far more intense [5].       

 

 

Notes

 

[1] It might also be pointed out that, as the daughter of a famous sculptor (Manuel Neri) and a graphic designer (Susan Neri), Ruby Neri was exposed to art and encouraged to be creative from a very young age. The influence of both parents can be seen in her work and it doubtless helped having the family background she did when it came to building her own career as an artist (though one hesitates to use the resentful term nepo baby as it clearly originates in envy). 

 

[2] The Mission School is an art movement of the 1990s and 2000s that emerged in the Mission District of San Francisco, associated with a core group of artists who attended (or hung around with those who attended) the San Franciso Art Institute (where Neri's father taught). 

      It is closely aligned with the lowbrow art movement which takes its inspiration from urban culture and likes to use non-traditional art materials, such as house paint, spray paint, correction fluid, ballpoint pens, and various found objects. Perhaps not surprisingly, therefore, the Mission School artists cultivated a neo-hippie anti-establishment, anti-consumerist perspective on the world.

 

[3] Neri's exhibition, entitled, Chorus, runs until 22 Feb 2025 (having opened on 9 January) at Massimo De Carlo, 16 Clifford Street, Mayfair, London, W1. For full details and to view all the works on display, go to the gallery website: click here.

 

[4] Despite having both feet on the ground, the central blonde figure in a blue dress carrying a white flower reminds me of the young woman skipping along Piccadilly about whom I published a post earlier in the week: click here.  

[5] Rothko was always adamant that his paintings were not as calm and peaceful as observers often thought: 'I would like to say to those who think of my pictures as serene [...] that I have imprisoned the most utter violence in every inch of their surface.' 

 

 

Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Barnett Newman's Onement VI

Barnett Newman: Onement VI (1953)

Sixty years after it was painted, Barnett Newman's Onement VI sold at Sotheby's in New York for $43.8m, which, as the art critic Jonathan Jones says, is a tremendous bargain for what is an essentially priceless work of art; one that offers us a glimpse not only of the sublime understood from the perspective of traditional aesthetics, but of the blissful blue unity that belongs to what D. H. Lawrence calls the Greater Day. 

In other words, Onement VI is more than an artwork; it's a portal onto a prelapsarian world lying on the other side of angel-guarded gates; an act of defiance against God's judgement and an assertion of man's right to return to Eden home. The hope of regaining paradise - what else, asks Newman, could possibly explain the seemingly insane desire to be a painter or poet ...?

A vertical light-blue line - what Newman liked to term a zip and which is an iconic and revolutionary aspect of his mature work - divides the flat expanse of perfect deep blueness in a manner suggestive of the biblical creation myth when the waters of heaven were separated from those of the earth. Again, it's as if Newman - one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and a leading exponent of colour field painting - is directly challenging God in his capacity as the maker of worlds: 'Anything you can do ...'

But the painting also challenges the viewer who stands before it, obliging them to be aware of their own presence and locality - as well as their own contingency and isolation - before the Void, whilst, at the same time, conscious also of their belonging to and connectedness with the universe and all things in it. In other words, Onement VI - like all great artworks - helps put us back into touch and atone for the Fall (understood as a fall not into sin, so much as into self-consciousness and separateness). 

Whilst at 102" x 120" it's not monumental in size, it's a work - one is tempted to call it an event - on an inhuman scale. And Newman - shamefully underappreciated as a painter for much of his life (the media preferring to promote the work of more volatile characters such as Jackson Pollock) - is a true giant of American art who almost at times makes his far more successful friend Mark Rothko seem a little lame in comparison.