Role-Play: Caroline Yates and Arthur Neal NEAC

Henry Ward

A two-person show is an interesting proposition. Bring two different artists together and the exhibition becomes a discursive space: a conversation that opens up possibilities for poetic synergies as well as intriguing contradictions. In Role-Play, Caroline Yates and Arthur Neal share the language of paint but speak it in distinctly different ways. Both are explorers, interested less in arriving at a fixed image than in discovering what a painting might become.

Yates’s paintings are ostensibly abstract. They are about the process of painting itself, with forms emerging through the act of making. In this sense, they are found paintings, their energy and visceral presence arising from an interplay of gestural marks, scumbled passages and collaged elements. In Silver Dollar, the inclusion of an incomplete frame hints at an expanded form of practice. Elsewhere, shapes begin to mutate into recognisable things: the outline of a horse’s head, something resembling limbs, the suggestion of an object or an ear. Noticing these forms, then looking at the titles, Western Horsemen, Blue Boot, Gay Rodeo, I find myself smiling. These are playful paintings, but their playfulness rests on a serious engagement with how images emerge from paint.

Neal’s paintings move more visibly between abstraction and representation. Having begun as an abstract painter at art school, he has worked towards figuration and continued to move between the two ever since. Recognisable figures and settings emerge from compositions built with abstracted, almost geometric forms, handled with considerable painterly confidence. His beaches and interiors possess a slightly out-of-time quality, like memories taking shape. There are echoes of Richard Diebenkorn in this persistent negotiation between representation and abstraction, while Neal’s thickly painted slabs, tessellating to construct a composition, also recall Nicolas de Staël. As with Yates, the image is inseparable from the material decisions through which it comes into being.

What, then, do these two bodies of work have to say to one another? Their common ground lies in the unstable threshold between representation and abstraction. Neither artist settles comfortably in one territory or the other. Both invite us to experience a painting first as a physical presence; colour, surface, texture, gesture, before it resolves into an image, or sometimes doesn’t. For both, painting is a process of discovery, an act of finding the image through the material possibilities of paint.

In Yates’s work, thick cobalt blue meets the frayed edge of collaged canvas; in Neal’s, a patchwork of irregular blocks in greys, creams and blues constructs a sky. In each, the pleasure lies as much in the physical sensation of paint as in what it depicts. Looking at these paintings requires us to keep shifting our attention, revising our interpretations as marks become images and images return to painterly marks. In Yates’s Western Horseman, rectangles of scribbled paint begin to resemble photographs or postcards pinned to a wall. In Neal’s Summer End, a pair of brilliantly rendered, bright-blue swimming trunks takes on the strange flatness of a cut-out, almost as though it had been collaged into the painting. Each artist finding a way to unsettle the relationship between the painted surface and the world it evokes.

This instability, the moment an abstract mark becomes an image, or an image reveals itself as an arrangement of paint, is where the two practices meet most compellingly. I’m reminded of Roy Oxlade and his cycle of painting, scraping away, erasing and reworking, before a sudden flourish of drawing describes an object or figure in its simplest form. Yates and Neal similarly resist allowing a painting to settle into a single way of seeing. Their work tensely balances representation and abstraction, allowing us to see both the thing depicted and the paint itself.

These works reward sustained attention. The longer we spend with them, the more they reveal, as forms emerge, recede and take on new meanings. Seen together, Yates and Neal’s paintings do more than share a space: they sharpen our understanding of each artist, while opening up a richer conversation about the possibilities of painting itself.