Neil Zakiewicz: Blinkys
09.11.24 – 14.12.24
opens Saturday 9 November, noon to six pm
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(image: Neil Zakiewicz 'AW' 45×35cm, acrylic on canvas, stretched over a timber subframe, 2024, photography by Andy Keate) ⇉ download text and partial list of works as a pdf)
An anticipatory screen cursor, a puppet's discoid eye moving between open and lash–shut; a spectral recollection; the stuttering gas–tube signage above a members' club; a German minimalist. It could be a lost episode of The Mighty Boosh.
Blinkys is at once everything it says on the tin and the magic bits of decision–making we rarely think about but that define our assessments of and interactions with others. It pays playful homage to notions of portraiture and painting in a time of rampant selfie–ism and algorithmic image generation. And, the long and twisty history of creators as 'characters', interesting people – famous or otherwise – known through their work or perhaps intimately. But, here, all sitters have been referentially rinsed, marinated in the mind's eye to arrive canvas–first as a riotous universe of remodelled signifiers.
We understand people as much through what they do and create as through how they appear, and in Neil Zakiewicz's world, visual appearances are as mercurial and wilful as the words that might be used to describe them. Sometimes, they are simply proper nouns in designer fonts, all Euclidean angles chromatically Cirque du Soleil–ed into being via a joyful Ab–Ex palette. The artist himself can be found among the fray of creatives that move him – rhomboid, hole–punch–eyed and rendered in Guston pink.
Where the titular art figure Palermo freed painted 'objects' from their contexts, Zakiewicz appears to have ushered them back into each ground on the Vinted promise of being used to rebuild something, or someone, anew. Yet, each canvas is bordered by a box–like frame – Mobius neo–geo strips that remind us of its objecthood, unchanged through time. A nod perhaps to the enduring effectiveness of painting and its oldest tropes, or maybe just to the fact he has found a new love for them both.
Domo Baal is very much looking forward to presenting Neil Zakiewicz's third solo exhibition in the gallery following on from 'Working' in 2008 (with a text by John Chilver) and 'Come Alive' in 2022. With many thanks to Rebecca Geldard (appleandhat.com) for the text and Andy Keate for the photography.