France

Neal Rock

A constant in Rock?s work over the past fourteen years has been his use of silicone as a paint material, in a practice that the artist insists be viewed primarily through a lens of painting and its histories. Yet since relocating from London in 2007, Rock?s work has been significantly transformed through an engagement with a particular type of classical sculpture: the herm. Rock addresses the herm as a cultural, spatial, apotropaic object that simultaneously entertains adornment, translation and masking. In his working processes, Rock uses skins of silicone and screenprinted images, alongside found, manipulated and fabricated objects, all of which are composed together in the gallery space, as a negotiation from the studio. Rock continues to maintain and deepen his interest in the complexity of surface in painting, of shifting oscillations between opacity and transparency. An address to the body as queered, made-up, defaced, contorted, atrophied and decaying is conveyed ? via the herm ? through an idea of the prosthetic and the mask. These qualities and interests are not so much directly implicit as indirect, fetishized and displaced between relations of objects, surfaces and images.

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