Neil Gall. Arrange Your Face

About

To arrange your face: to hide in plain sight; to compose your features in an attempt to conceal motives, feelings, or beliefs. The age–old art of dissembling is a necessity we each employ every day, for the purpose of sane conviviality if nothing else.

That the show's title is taken from Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall will not be lost on most. The phrase crops up time and time again in both the book and the television adaptation. The mantra repeated as Cromwell steadies himself to the task in hand: to keep a hold on power and his head.

Describing himself – resolutely – as an abstract painter, at first sight, paintings appear to belong to the contemporary 'trope' of collage, sampling and appropriation; destroy to rebuild etc., but Gall's task of looking at the overlooked begins prior to putting brush to canvas or gessoed panel, with construction. His subjects are his own creations, modelled in his studio out of assorted found objects – packaging, string, tape – their 'faces' collaged from casually appropriated scraps – discarded plastic flowers, crumpled pages ripped from magazines. The iconoclastic oddities are photographed and it is from these photographic records that Gall, as a painter, works.

There is no trickery to Gall's work, as for example with Noble & Webster's transformations of detritus, where the illusion remains as a stable illusion. He does not present us with façades, but rather with a way of looking at the overlooked. Portraits which invite us to question less how they came to be, but rather who exactly they are.