Once again I was on my way to the Elms Lesters Painting rooms to go and check out the latest dimensional paintings from Adam Neate. I still had so many good memories from Adam Neate’s last year’s show, also held at this venue, that I could not wait to see what this new show had to offer.
The layout and feel of the Elms Lesters painting rooms is as I remembered it – high ceilings, wooden floors and a relative darkness only interrupted by spots of lights giving the artist’s pieces all the shine and attention they deserve. But Adam Neate’s works would not even need all that for the visitor to quickly realise that what they are looking at is something quite special, something you also need to look at for a little moment to get what it actually is.
Acrylic, perspex, metal and aerosol on board : there you have what makes up Adam Neate’s works. But these mediums need some solid imagination as well as some advanced manual dexterity to transform and assemble some elaborate and intricate pieces of dimensional art – Adam Neate has just done that.
The palette used is flamboyant with a preference for red, the shapes are rounded, the end result is astonishing. Adam Neate’s art is very evocative, his job is to put shapes and colors together, your job is to see through these and come back out with a vision of the piece, your own vision of what you are actually looking at. I found his series of “Red Dimnesional Portraits” very powerful, I could almost hear them shouting at me as I walk past them. The flamboyant colors and defaced visages have certainly something to do with it.
This review will not be complete without mentioning his “Canvas Crucifix”. The Elms Lesters Painting rooms have been accommodated to give even more emphasis to this amazing piece of art. A wall was especially made so the piece could be hang on and with a clever setting of light and shadow, isolate the piece from everything else and draw people’s attention. I found myself very intrigued, slightly apprehensive and thinking “What the hell is that? Adam Neate torn the whole canvas, while still attached the frame, in a such way that he managed to produce what looks like a character on a crucifix. No painting here just a very original use of the canvas as such – a dimensional approach again.
The show at Elms Lesters Painting Rooms is now over. You will find more pictures of the show by scrolling down.
Australian artist MEGGS’s first show outside his native country is opening tomorrow, 23rd June 2010 at the 
