Patrick Neal & Fernando Rangel
PAINTINGS & PHOTOGRAPHS

May 24 – July 12, 2012

SBM Art Gallery
320 West 37th Street, Suite 704 New York, NY 10018

Opening Reception, Thursday, May 24, 6–8pm

Gallery Hours:
Wednesday 12–8pm, Thursday & Friday 4–8pm,
Saturday 12–8pm. Monday & Tuesday by appointment.
Closed on Sunday

Contact:
www.sbmartgallery.com
info@sbmgallery.com
phone: 347-230-8464

SBM Gallery is pleased to present paintings by Patrick Neal and Photographs by Fernando Rangel. This exhibition explores the continual struggle to integrate the dual worlds in which we exist: the external world which is the sum of our sensory experiences and the inner world of our mind and emotions. Neal, who works "from life" creating mini tableaus of studio props, detritus and his own drawings and notations, seeks to breathe new life into the genre of stillife in an age of anti-formalism. Rangel, using a camera to capture his own watercolor compositions in flux, makes adjustments in the process, discarding the painting and claiming the photograph as the final piece. Like photographing a Mandala, only the record of it exists.

Patrick Neal's paintings are infused with an early 21st century sensibility, particularly the struggle between formalism and anti-formalism. Although Neal's project is largely a formal enterprise, he is fascinated by still life, landscape and the figure, often considered old and cliched genres, as excellent vehicles for pondering developments of the past half century that call into question a discontentment with Modernism. Neal reinvigorates these older pictorial possibilities for the 21st century, within the vast world of modes of representation, and uses them as reference points for musings on the creation of artworks themselves. His interest lies in such things as texture, interplay, atmosphere and gravity as well as how the materials and arrangements evoke art historical periods and modes of art making throughout history.

Fernando Rangel, obsessed in understanding our precious world and the role mankind plays, has lead him to the realization: Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence. Love, happiness, and joy are not made and experienced in the "mind," but are felt somewhere deeper and larger in ourselves. Working in the realm of "no mind," Rangel's work evolves from these sacred spaces in a meditation of play. In looking toward "the East," Rangel attempts to forge an independent artistic identity that helps him define the modern age, and the modern mind, through a new understanding of existence, nature and consciousness. The Photographs continue to expand the astonishing depth and breadth of the Abstract Expressionist moment.

Patrick Neal has had solo exhibits at Eric Wolf, New York, NY in 2010 and The Chocolate Factory, Long Island City, NY in 2006 and 2007. Neal is a contributing arts writer to Hyperallergic and Boro and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1989, and received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 1994. Awards include a Vogelstein Grant, 1995 and Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, 1995.

Fernando Rangel has had a successful career creating art for Advertising, Editorial, and Book publishing industries in addition to selling portraits and landscapes. Working for Jeff Koons since 1996, he has had the honor of managing the painting studio in the past. With over 48 talented artists, they produced the important works in the Celebration, Easyfun, and Easyfun-Ethereal series, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.