Contributed by Sharon Butler and Jonathan Stevenson / Last month we stopped by the LIC building where Patrick Neal and Zach Seeger, two formidable painters, have studios. Both write on occasion for Two Coats of Paint, and we hadn’t seen what they’d been up to since we saw their solo shows – Zach’s “Sports” at Gold Montclair and Patrick’s “Winter was Hard” at Platform Project Space in DUMBO.
Zach divides his painting time between this Queens studio and a space in Binghamton. Upstate he has been working on portraits, but he’s been devoting this space to sports figures and high-performance cars, sometimes in the same paintings. It’s not that he’s a jock or a gearhead. He’s fascinated by icons and how they infiltrate the consciousness – cars embodying both danger and freedom, sports heroes both risk and triumph. Notable artists of many walks have glommed onto cars and car culture (John Chamberlain, Dan Devine, Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, and Wendy White, to name a few) as well as athletes (George Bellows, Fay Sanders, Clintel Steed, Andy Warhol, and Wendy White again, for instance, not to mention the ancient Greeks). In Zach’s paintings, fearless color captures the exuberance inherent in mechanical speed and human movement, while freewheeling brushwork takes the imagery in abstract directions, probing how far he can go before the image becomes unrecognizable. We have some appreciation of the wonder of the automobile, but Zach prompts us to drill deeper. During the Super Bowl, we weren’t sure how Mecole Hardman felt when he caught the touchdown pass that sealed the Kansas City Chiefs’ victory, and Zach makes us look beyond the obvious answer of “elated.”
Where Zach’s work is mainly about the rush of emotion, Patrick paints contemplatively from observation, bringing ideas about geometry and structure into the intimate spaces he inhabits or locates, which cover the spectrum between private and public – rooms, gardens, parks, construction sites, rustic scenes, vistas. He combines estimable painting skill and finesse with conceptual underpinnings. For his new work, Jennifer Bartlett has become a kind of guru. He recapitulates grid-like phenomena, such as fences or screens, that actually exist in the part of the external world he is representing. In others, he lightly superimposes a grid, as if to draw our attention to the framework that lies between structural reality and the artifice of painting. At the same time, the unlimited expansiveness of the grid demonstrates how small our own corner of the world truly is.
Each studio visit was gratifying, and the rich complementarity of the two artists was a bonus. Carry on, guys.
About the authors:
Sharon Butler is a painter and the publisher of Two Coats of Paint. Her solo show “MARCH” is on view at the Sarah Moody Gallery of Art at the University of Alabama through April 5, 2024. On March 20 at 3pm, she will be in Tuscaloosa for a gallery talk and a reception for the exhibition.
Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.
