{"id":76624,"date":"2022-08-18T13:01:32","date_gmt":"2022-08-18T18:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/artists\/clint-neufeld\/clint-neufeld\/"},"modified":"2023-01-18T12:06:10","modified_gmt":"2023-01-18T17:06:10","slug":"all-hat-no-cattle","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/artmur.com\/en\/artists\/clint-neufeld\/all-hat-no-cattle\/","title":{"rendered":"All hat No cattle"},"content":{"rendered":"
January 7 – February 25, 2023
\nOpening reception: Saturday, January 7, 2023, from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
\nClint Neufeld : All hat No cattle<\/em><\/p>\n

The Artful Unfamiliarity of Clint Neufeld\u2019s Work<\/em>
\nText by Yann Martel<\/p>\n

The first work of Clint Neufeld I ever saw was a hulking engine rendered in pink and lime green ceramic, so large that it hung from its own crane. It was called Screaming Jimmy, the first time we met in that field I knew you were the one and it occupied a corner of his studio. It had that instant charisma that works of art can have, whereby your eyes are drawn to it and your mind immediately starts trying to process what it is seeing.<\/p>\n

I was right away struck by the balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar. I looked and I thought, \u201cThat\u2019s an engine, presumably of a tractor or a truck it\u2019s so big\u201d. Of course, it was not an engine. Like Magritte\u2019s \u201cCeci n\u2019est pas une pipe\u201d\u2014because it\u2019s a painting of a pipe\u2014Neufeld\u2019s engine was an imitation of an engine, something not usually held to be attractive, but here, taken out of the grimy shop, cleaned, replicated, coloured and glazed, made absolutely beautiful, shockingly so.<\/p>\n

It brought back a powerful memory: once, while travelling in Iran, I came upon an enormous power station on the shore of the Caspian Sea\u2014a colossal complex, old and worn, purely utilitarian, endlessly fed cheap Iranian oil\u2014and I thought, \u201cWow! What a thing of beauty!\u201d In the way time and moisture had decided on how the metal parts were mottled with rust and how the painted parts were chipped and faded, in the way the complex was purely meant to function and not appear, it looked not industrial but organic, a living creature nestled along a coastline, surprised at the sight of a Canadian backpacker.<\/p>\n

In a same way, I reacted to Neufeld\u2019s work, liking the Duchampesque statement This is art of it and the open dialogue it started in my mind. Neufeld\u2019s method is a clear one, repeated and varied for the last few years. A putatively ugly thing, traditionally masculine and utilitarian, is rendered in ceramic, an explicitly beautiful and delicate material. Not only that: glazed in soft, pastel colours. More than that: glazed and decorated with floral motifs. Sometimes even more: the flowers are made explicit\u2014they grow out of or around the engine parts. Then the whole is removed from its habitual outside context and brought inside, into the domestic arena, where it might be set on a sofa or a tray or a glass dish, borrowings or, in some cases, imitations of cozy comfort.<\/p>\n

What to make of this conflation of the brutish and the refined? The hard and the soft? The useful and the useless?<\/p>\n

To each viewer his or her path. I seek no answers, I just go along in that tippy balance between what I know and what I don\u2019t, between the ugly and the beautiful, the masculine and the feminine, the functional and the not, the outer and the inner. In the end, that\u2019s what I am, a tippy balance, a hope that I am both engine and flower, useful and not, as alive as a power station.<\/p><\/div>\n

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