Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve
Drunken Butterfly
Neal Fox , England
•
Livre d'or
Milen Till , Germany
Neal Fox, courtesy Galerie Suzanne Tarasiève
Neal Fox's exhibition is held at the gallery space located at 7 Rue Pastourelle and Milen Till is exhibited at Loft19 (5 Passage de l'Atlas).
Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve is pleased to present Drunken Butterfly, an exhibition of new paintings by Neal Fox in collaboration with the poet Jeremy Reed, inspired by a magic island.
Since 2018 Fox has been living on the Greek island of Amorgos, and engaging in a correspondence with the poet Jeremy Reed in London. Fox would send Reed a drawing or painting, and Reed would respond with poems, back and forth. Fox says of the process “neither of us would directly illustrate or describe each other’s work, it was more like a way for our imaginations to influence each other and for our shared ideas to mutate into new images.’’
Neal Fox makes pictures which bring together a cosmology of cultural ghosts in a psychedelic dreamscape that crosses time and space. Growing up in London, Fox began to make drawings of his deceased grandfather, a writer and bomber pilot, interacting with an ever expanding cast of characters from Francis Bacon to Jack Kerouac. In Drunken Butterfly, William Burroughs, Billie Holiday, Serge Gainsbourg, David Bowie and many more form a crew of misfits who board a ship from a decadent city and sail across the high seas to a mysterious island. Once there they share the stage with figures of ancient mythology... Dionysus, Eros, Thanatos, Persephone, Circe and the butterfly winged goddess Psyche.
Fox says “living in a mountain village on this island you can really feel the mythology in the landscape...I was reading about the Greek myths and the Eleusinian mysteries. I realised what I’ve been doing over the years is creating a kind of afterlife for all these people and my grandad... he’s still there in a lot of the pictures wearing a black coat and hat. People would travel from all over Greece to Eleusis for 2000 years to drink a potion that that gave them a life changing vision of the afterlife.”
Fox met Reed at Red Snapper, a rare bookshop close to his grandfather’s old territory, the bars and clubs of London’s Soho. Over time they formed a connection through their shared inspirations. The visionary novelist J G Ballard said ‘‘Jeremy Reed’s talent is almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance. He is Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautreamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised.’’
This meeting of minds between an artist, a poet, and their overlapping universes has conjured strange scenes. Ballard and Bowie sip Aperol on the beach in the painting Holidays in the Sun, watching a car sex scene that could be from the novel Crash, while in Temple of Mystery Frida Kahlo and a jaguar climb a Mayan pyramid for a psychotropic picnic with the goddess Isis and a bird headed Bob Dylan.
Fox will also also be showing 2.5 meter high stained glass windows from his series of outlaw saints Beware of the God, made with traditional methods at the the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer, in collaboration with Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich.
In his introduction for the exhibition’s accompanying publication, Andrzej Klimowski, Fox’s former professor at the Royal College of Art writes “His compositions are dramatic, satirical, raw and seductive. There is a perverse beauty in the paintings, vulgarity dances in step with the sublime and we, the audience, cannot help but join in the vertiginous dance. We dance to the music composed and written by Neal Fox and his poet friend Jeremy Reed, a partnership that works in counterpoint and occasionally hits harmonious crescendos.”
Rendez-Vous
Thursday 19 May 2022 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Opening – Milen Till / Livre d’or
Paris, France 7 Rue Pastourelle
Paris, France 0142717654 www.suzanne-tarasieve.com
The gallery
After running for 25 years a gallery outside of Paris in Barbizon, Suzanne Tarasieve opened her first space in Paris in 2003, in the Louise Weiss neighborhood. In 2008, she opened a second space, LOFT 18, offering temporary exhibition and a residency program in order to support artists from abroad.
In 2011, Suzanne Tarasieve moved her main gallery space to Le Marais, showing established and emerging artists, with an international exhibition program underlining the great historical transformations of the XXth and XXIst century. The program is developed in collaboration with museums, art centers and curators. The synergy between LOFT 19 and the space in Le Marais allows Suzanne Tarasieve to produce and exhibit works spawning from german neo-expressionism (Markus Lüpertz, Georg Baselitz, A. R. Penck, Jörg Immendorff, Sigmar Polke), to recent works by young artists. The gallery also represents three renowned photographers : Boris Mikhaïlov, Juergen Teller and Jürgen Klauke.
Gallery artists
Georg Baselitz • Jean Bedez • Romain Bernini • Alkis Boutlis • Alin Bozbiciu • Gil Heitor Cortesão • Russell Crotty • Nina Mae Fowler • Neal Fox • Recycle Group • Le Gun • Jörg Immendorff • Eva Jospin • Benjamin Katz • Jürgen Klauke • Youcef Korichi • Kriki • Markus Lüpertz • Shanthamani. M • Boris Mikhaïlov • Lucien Murat • Ed Paschke • A.R. Penck • Tim Plamper • Sigmar Polke • Léopold Rabus • Antoine Roegiers • Pierre Schwerzmann • Terry Taylor • Juergen Teller • Anna Tuori • Anne Wenzel
