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Manuel Neri at Hackett-Freedman
Art in America, June, 2003 by Mark Van Proyen
Manuel Neri's career-long focus on the solitary female form was fully evident in this compact survey gleaned from a decade's worth of work. Of the 15 sculptures and five mixed-medium works on paper that comprised the show, the most ambitious were variations on two distinct conceptions of the body. One was exemplified by the painted-bronze standing figures of the "Prietas" series, and the other by a group of partial figures (principally head and torso) masterfully carved from Carrara marble and called the "Ostraca." All semi-naturalistic, the works could be taken as embodied allusions to two archetypal notions of the female. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, Neri enthusiastically embraced the humanistic mythopoesis of the Greco-Roman figurative tradition without any recourse to ironic self-consciousness.
The bronzes, cast from hand-built plaster figures, have an animated, casual look that belies their material heft. Cast in editions of four, each is uniquely painted and/or patinated in an improvisatory way that underscores the figure's emotional nature. In Prietas Series I (1993-2000), a young woman of delicate build and almost ceremonial self-possession bends her arms in an ambiguous gesture that could be taken either as an invitation or a display of defiance. Her mobile-looking countenance seems at once anxious and confident, strongly evoking antique representations of the intrepid Persephone standing on the threshold of the wintry underworld. Although its sharply chiseled face conveys only minimal anatomical detail, the figure's overall expressivity is accentuated with gestural applications of yellow, orange and gray pigment, suggesting a kinship with the inhabitants of the late 1950s paintings by fellow Bay Area figurative artist David Park.
If the bronzes seem to evoke Persephone, it is the motherly Demeter who is summoned up by Neri's "Ostraca" series. The pitted and polished marble in Ostrakon (2000) seems reserved and timeless in a way that amplifies the form's suggestion of an older and maternally stolid presence. As with the "Prietas" works, this figure is standing, though the two-thirds composition begins above the knees. The more impassive attitude allows for greater attention to the sensuousness of both the rendered body and the lustrous material that represents it. The weighty, luxuriant sensuality felt reassuring, a good antidote for current anxiety.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group
