Fantasy Traveller
February 11 - March 13, 2016
Neil Raitt
Press Release
Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present Fantasy Traveller, the first New York solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture by London based artist Neil Raitt.
For this exhibition, Raitt continues to recast and retool gestures from Bob Ross’s Joy of Painting with his signature algorithmic and generative approach. Helixing hand-painted, traditional motifs and glyphs of evergreen forests, cascading waterfalls, desert cacti and rustic cabins across his cyber-landscapes, Raitt renders representation into pattern and shuttles it back again ad infinitum. Influenced by computer games, fractal curves, digital arrangements and linear systems, these quasi-panoramas simultaneously emphasize both the individual subject and their inhabited space, driving tensions between real and sublime, analogue and digital, landscape and pattern.
Raitt includes three sculptural works in the exhibition which equally draw attention to the balances that exist throughout his practice. Hand built, rustic cabin rooftops, all differing in scale and orientation, yet similar in construction, are rendered by the artist out of common building materials. Utilizing and employing recognizable iconography from his canvases as contextually elusive constructions, these structures further the idea that his territories are at once temporal and definite. Upended and skewed onto their sides, they evoke a sense of dislocation between present and past, while highlighting a central narrative to his practice that is fraught with humor and levity.
Neil Raitt (b. 1986) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. Raitt has recently had solo exhibitions at the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, with an upcoming solo exhibition planned for the Spring at Mon Chéri, Brussels. The artist has been included in group shows at Untitled, NY, Choi and Lager, Cologne and Super Dakota, Brussels. Additionally, Raitt is the recipient of the Catlin Art Prize 2014. Raitt lives and works in London.