Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve

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 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.’’