Fetch
Acrylic paint and peacock feathers on acrylic panel
96 x 108 in
Bill Lowe Gallery is pleased to present the newest exhibition of works by Atlanta artist Jimmy O’Neal in About Now: An Introspective. In this quasi-retrospective exhibition, new paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations, alongside remastered earlier works, create an immersive platform for a central theme from throughout the artist’s three-decade career: the exposure of the thin membranes that exist between our experiences of reality. O’Neal articulates this most effectively through the application of his self- engineered, lens-based mark-making.
Over the years, O’Neal’s scientific mindset has led him to innovate in both the materials and processes that guide his practice. For instance, the mirrored acrylic painting technique he created during the late 1990s speaks to the legacy of other contemporary artists, like Michelangelo Pistolleto, who used the mirror as a strategy for inviting the viewer’s participation. However, in O’Neal’s case, it is within the mirrored lens paint itself that he makes each one of us an active component of his intricate compositions constructed with expressive, highly textured, and overlapping abstract traces. In another grouping of works, the artist has incorporated technological tools into his creative process through his “brain-machine” constructed to “paint” the artist’s brain waves and eye motion resulting from external stimuli.
Using his lens-based painting technique, O’Neal’s paintings reflect the world around us masterfully changed by the painter and perhaps truer to feeling. O’Neal presents the evocative nature of the frequencies and unseen visual poetry that are ever-present, thus documenting an individuated experience of the constant flow of consciousness. To do so, he captures “real-time” signifiers of this reality and provides us with glimpses into the universal Gnosis - our inner knowing of that which we cannot consciously articulate. Steeped in multi-dimensional theory, O’Neal’s abstract large format gestural paintings envelop the viewer in a distorted, parallel reality - through the looking glass. Redefining the material possibilities of medium, mechanics, and time is at the heart of the insatiable curiosity that drives O’Neal’s practice. The result is paintings that transform our sensory perceptions into something that can only be captured by the experience in a singular moment.
"This is the magic – born out of contrasts: space/time, here/ there, then/now."
O’Neal has exhibited in galleries and museums, includingThe Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, and the Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art. He received his BFA in Illustration and his MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). O’Neal has created many major public art installations, including one of Atlanta’s largest commissioned works at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Golden Goal. Additionally, his paintings and public works are in the collection at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the Cobb Energy Building in Atlanta, Georgia; the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS); and the Hanesbrands Theatre, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
EXHIBITION: ‘About Now An Introspective’ Extract from exhibition ESSAY BY: DR. DAVID ANFAM | THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS:
“At face value, Jimmy O’Neal’s art explores transparency, opacity, reflectance and gesture. Yet, of course, these characteristics are its means, not ends. No observer should mistake O’Neal’s media for his messages, hypnotic though the former’s effects may be. The paintings seem to say “I’ll be your mirror” – with a nod more to The Velvet Underground’s song lyrics (1967) than to their record producer Andy Warhol’s deadpan, passive-aggressive persona – even as their membranes entice and elude the enquiring gaze.
The essential point is that mirrors, from at least the ancient Greek times of the Narcissus myth onward, have conveyed extremely mixed messages. As a historian of the subject remarks, “Mirrors are meaningless unless someone looks into them. Thus, a history of the mirror is really the history of looking, and what we perceive in these magical surfaces can tell us a great deal about ourselves – whence we have come, what we imagine, how we think, and what we yearn for. The mirror appears throughout the human drama as a means of self-knowledge or self-delusion.
We have used the reflective surface both to reveal and to hide reality”. These words might as well apply to O’Neal. A veritable mirror-meister, he refreshes a trope almost as old and as laden with fertile contradictions as humankind itself, not least because mirroring involves the human body and its neurological system”. In a nutshell, the foregoing could be O’Neal’s credo, albeit updated for the twenty-first century’s technological know-how and gizmos. Surely Pollock would have approved, given his remark in the same note: “Technic is the result of a need— new needs demand new technics—” O’Neal’s dynamic is nothing if not about “making it new” (to recall the poet Ezra Pound’s slogan) so that – as this show’s title has it – whatever he does is “about now” and, to cite another painting’s title, “optimizing the moment”.
The equation with Pollock can go further. For example, Pollock had incorporated heterodox materials into his pigment skeins, including nails, string, a key and sand. O’Neal goes one step further, adding flies, bees, snake skin, goat fur, a butterfly, leaves and, in Fetch, peacock feathers. “Organic intensity”, indeed. Furthermore, this heterotopia – to borrow a notion from the French post- structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault – plays upon memory, even melancholia. To quote O’Neal, “I have a fantasy of mixing peoples’ ashes, the ashes of a loved one in the clear pigment and doing the person’s portrait so all can see themselves within the rendering of the person.” In a similar vein, he explains that “of course, all of the elements that are mixed in the paint are just for remembrance of a fading natural/physical world. They float amongst the reflections.” If one world fades, another brightens.
To wit, our finale: O’Neal’s recent output. In my reckoning, it often trumps or crowns his earlier work. Let us consider this heterotopia. Fragments or ruins populate the mirror paintings. Before them, during the 1990s, the motifs were sometimes nearidentifiable: an eye, a clock or watch face (nota bene the coupling of human identity, the “face”, with supra- human time), chimaeras, light bulbs, a shoe – shades of the late Philip Guston. Now, metamorphosis is everything. Like water that eddies, quivers, reflects and engulfs, the fields flow with the pulsing flux of consciousness, whether human or morphed into simulacra.
THE IRISH POET W. B. YEATS FORETOLD THE LATTER
WHILE ADDRESSING THE FORMER:
THOSE IMAGES THAT YET
FRESH IMAGES BEGET,
THAT DOLPHIN-TORN, THAT GONG-TORMENTED SEA
In a nutshell, this show is an “introspective”. Notwithstanding its spectacular array, the core impulse still looks within rather than merely backward. Aptly, O’Neal has, on occasion, used EEG headgear to transform his electrical brain activity into traces. Interiority is rendered optically. In any event, Yeats knew Gnostic philosophy, which has much in common with Neo-Platonism. “Gnosis” denotes inner knowledge. Doubtless, O’Neal prizes this quality. As he explained about the passing insect that serendipitously intersected with his graphic delineation of brain waves during an earlier project: “So, in essence, my moth-in-the-brain-waves breakthrough – to look inside for a suggested transcendental centre [my italics] – came... like a rock through a sacred rosary.” The mirrored paintings may play tricks with the eyes and, consequently, the mind. However, they never come across as tricksy. Instead, they amount to a theatre of the mind, a latterday reinvention of the Renaissance’s Theatrum mundi or “theatre of the world”. That omniscient perspective sees little and large, past, present and future, from an encompassing perspective. William Shakespeare voiced it in a passage too wellknown to need quoting when he wrote that “All the world’s a stage...”
O’Neal has transformed this ancient stage into a contemporary memory theatre. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, he transports the viewer through the looking glass: “Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow... Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze so that we can get through. Why it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! And certainly, the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright, silvery mist”. Subtract the child’s play-acting from this fantastical realm, make it visual, and you have... O’Neal’s vivid, if fleeting, mindscapes. Their marks-cumlenses twist, turn, intertwine, disperse, wane cloudy, or wax transparent, reflect our presence and dissolve their own. Always they dance to the music of time, appearing to our vision and imaginations as through a glass, brightly.”
To accompany Jimmy O'Neal’s show , “About Now, An Introspective”, Bill Lowe Gallery has published “Through The Looking Glass” -- an essay by the art writer,
international curator and critic David Anfam. Based in central London, Dr. Anfam is the foremost authority on Abstract Expressionism.In addition, his many writings include books and catalogues on Lynda Benglis, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Hans Hartung, Anish Kapoor, Brice Marden, Robert Rauschenberg, Wayne Thiebaud and Cy Twombly .
Article sourced by Derek Culley
© Art Ex Ltd 2022
