Neil Hancock : Careful Man

Neil Hancock employs language and signs as material. Across paper and canvas, he nimbly pushes and blurs the boundary between drawing and writing. He embraces endless repetition to the degree that meaning becomes secondary to form. The subjects are borrowed from the artist’s daily life, as often for the context as for the style. Graffiti and vernacular urban signage are commonly referenced, then beaten to death through reiteration. An audience in the know might trace Neil’s daily patterns and favorite places, happening upon the source material in the wild be it on the side of a busy road or behind a deli counter.

Subjects in Neil's drawings and paintings repeat into an infinite groupset. Burgers, martini glasses, palm trees, five-pointed stars, snowmen appear and reappear, the same and yet always distinct and changing ever so slightly, like a signature. For Neil, much like the Minimalist painter Robert Ryman, repetition is not about seriality, but restriction and discipline. In Ryman’s practice it was never a matter of what to paint–he only ever painted white monochrome canvases–but how to paint. The constraint of subject matter was generative. Every new drawing and painting is in dialogue with those before it, and the small changes and adjustments are magnified by the objective similarities. Neil’s pet subjects are so ubiquitous that they become transparent. The palm tree disappears leaving the viewer to confront its makeup–the linework, the color choices, the energy, and the mistakes.  

Neil works in acrylic paint, pencil, marker–quotidian tools of rapid creation. His practice is frantic and articulated in short bursts of inspiration. Negative space plays a prominent visual role in moments when it appears he stopped seemingly out of nowhere to move onto the next subject or iteration. In other works he spends hours filling a space on the paper obsessively with pencil. He cherishes mistakes and moments where the materials got away from him–drips, smudges, discolorations which spotlight the medium as an earnest collaborator rather than a tool. Going over the unending body of work with Neil he often seems as surprised and charmed as the viewer to see a certain piece pop up, as though he was not even present for its execution and instead rendered the drawing in a Jekyll and Hyde-style fugue state. 

This new body of work stems from Neil’s recent sobriety, with words, phrases, and icons–“Vodka Rocks,” “I Hate Beer,”–nurturing and cultivating a newfound clarity while recalling a complicated and debaucherous time in a complicated and debaucherous city.