Good vs Evil

Informed by her youth in rural Vermont, ideas of nature, landscape and death are prevalent in Elizabeth Neel’s practice, though she addresses these themes indirectly; her works explore the signifying language of paint itself, veering energetically between abstraction and figuration. Through translucent strata, diaphanous outlines and transverse drips of paint, Neel’s Good vs Evil creates a choreography of animal form. Dogs, or perhaps the recurrent image of the same dog, are layered on top of one another. Whether they are mating, fighting or cavorting is uncertain; repeated limbs and heads convey a filmic impression of movement, echoing the Futurist force lines and symbolic charge of animals painted by Franz Marc. Hazy tones of blue, purple and black accentuate the sense that this is a phantom vision, threatening to melt away into the negative white space beneath. The canine action is alert, dynamic and multi-directional: Neel’s paint drips leftward, showing that she worked with the canvas in landscape format before reorienting the finished work. ‘The interplay between vertical and horizontal is part of being in the world,’ she says. ‘I think the technical necessity to work both ways ends up allowing each painting to communicate both perspectives and positions of being.’