Full of ideas, Elizabeth Neel’s “Lobster with Shell Game,” which runs through July 3 at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, trumpets an expressive abstraction somewhere between choreography and calligraphy. Much unprimed canvas goes untouched in these monumentally scaled works, such that we can clearly see the evidence of an arsenal of exuberant techniques and imagine the performing body they record. Much more than the drips, skeins, and slings of yore, in stunning works like What We Are Thinking / How We Are Acting, 2014, we see viscous opaque Rorschach puddles of folded black, thin, transparent splashes of latte, energetic backhands of cobalt, smudged slicks of brown, and gravity’s vertical veils in romantic salmon and magenta. Neel punctuates all this with several white rectangles that lend architecture, a sense of depth, and the possibility of order to these fields, which otherwise faithfully conjure Greenberg’s flatland. The specter of Abstract Expressionism hovers over this show, making one wonder what drives Neel (not unlike many of her peers) to orchestrate such a palpable revival. In the show’s eponymous work, Lobster with Shell Game, 2015, Neel includes a series of monoprints of an apple cut in half and inked. A cheeky joke, it recalls Pollock’s own Cro-Magnon handprints. One suspects that it is, for the most part, all in good fun. Her titles — Black’s Pond (Eating Languages), Man’s Animal, Response to the Tide, Non Antelope, Of Ungulate — sound like snatches of midcentury poetry, possible starts for Frost or Bishop. Like her paintings, they portray a dalliance with language, a desire to play with grammar and its permutations both visually and verbally.In the exhibition’s most magisterial work, The Last Thing on the First Day, 2014, we again receive a seductive vocabulary of marks, this time in purple, white, and canyon orange zooming through an animated vista. Even here, however, one regrets a few of Neel’s forays, such as the silly scalloped rosettes (they recur throughout the show), which seem best left in the tool kit. Unfortunate passages of mushy, indiscriminate mixing leave the viewer wishing, too late, that the brush had not gone so far. Though certainly decorative, these works will put up a good fight beside many a divan. Neel’s spirited palettes are often a well-paired success, though it’s hard to tell what a decorator will do with her hunger for chocolate brown, especially when it gets mixed with mossy greens. Leather-studded study? Hunting lodge? Alas, with experimentation comes risk, as Neel is bold enough to remind us.A version of this article appears in the September 2015 issue of Modern Painters.
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