Review: DEPTH OVER DISTANCE
Text: Irene Kobalchuk 
​Amsterdam 2018

Depth over Distance is an attempt to explore the intricate nature of art. In this conceptual group exhibition, Neil Fortune brought together 7 Amsterdam-based artists, including himself, to show their unfinished and finished artworks at VOX-POP. Besides Fortune’s Social Sculpture (2018), a floorpiece of textile and polyester, which lead the visitor further to Distorted Realities: The Stage (2018), a plexiglass cube with gloves and various shapes inside, the space hosted Frank Mandersloot’s Diced Ice (2012), Ian James Carr’s Beat the Larry (2018), Tim Hudson’s Pure Mk III (2016), Jesse Ahlers’ Carmine Lake (2017), Yasser Ballemans’ Tools of change (2018), Cecilia Bengtsson’s When we meet (2017), Antonio Jose Guzman’s Circular Genesis (2018). Being not only a participant but also a curator of the exhibition, Neil invited his fellow artists to take part in his investigation and share how they are dealing with the ‘unfinished’ aspect of their artworks. 

The artworks presented at the exhibition are united by the question whether the artwork needs a viewer to become complete? Looking at Fortune’s works is only the first layer of the experience and is not enough to fully immerse in the meaning. He creates a space where the viewers can have their own conversation with the artwork. First, the artwork activates the viewer, then the viewer activates the work and, in this way, makes it a finished piece. As opposed to art removed from reality, a usable and tangible Social Sculpture hints that art is not necessarily an object and creates an intangible value and sense of the moment. Instead of art in isolation, the ‘unfinished’ works suggest using art as a language, as a means of communication. Neil installs social situations in Distorted Realities: The Stage and uses it as a model and metaphor. One could never guess what the shapes inside the plexiglass box are made of, what is their weight and how does their surface feels unless one engages with the piece. This brings up another point of how fast people are at making decisions, even if they see something briefly and look superficially. At the same time, the building blocks inside the box resemble a visualisation of how ideas build up and transform into tangible forms, an instrument which helps navigate through whatever is happening around.
Both the Social Sculpture and Distorted Realities: The Stage have an aspect of sharing, as the artist does his ‘half’ of the work by making it, and the audience does another ‘half’ by using it. However, art doesn't always need the audience to be meaningful - artist's design and effort sustain the artwork enough to exist on its own - but the message put in the work is still aimed at reaching the audience, and presumably, the artist has a vision of what emotions and thoughts he wants to trigger. In this sense, Fortune’s works are ambivalent and leave enough space for the audience to find out how to interact with art. The works are not necessarily meant to be touched but they are not necessarily made only to be looked at. Depth over Distance gives an unmediated experience (but still slightly directed by the artist) and invite to communicate with art intuitively to grasp its initial message and find a meaning of your own

Review: Friction in the Space Between 
Text: Eric Rutgrink 
​Amsterdam 2016

There are soft echoes of the ‘happenings’ of the 1960s and 70s in Neil Fortune’s second solo show at Galerie 23 in Amsterdam.  Amongst a selection of hung artworks, ‘participants’ encounter three cushioned floor installations, works that fill large sections of the exhibition’s actual physical space.  They are opportune invasions into the contemplative gallery space with guests walking or sitting carefully upon the cushioned terrain like infrequent beach-goers enjoying the sensations of sand underfoot.  However, unlike those earlier Fluxus experiences, there is an intentionality to these works that limits complete spontaneity or abandonment.  It is rather the principle of ‘improvisation conforming to an environment’ that confronts the gallery visitor here.  These works remain non-threatening, welcoming, almost playful in their approach to interactivity and space.

While seated or standing on the floor installations, the gallery walls again become the focus.  A number of paintings are included that depict white empty spaces with dark voids beyond, like white cube galleries or stage, sets waiting for a show.  They are self-reflective, mimicking the very spaces we find ourselves in.  Other paintings – including a central group of 18 canvases – show irregular compositions of rough wooden structural beams with open or filled housing joints. Like skeletons, these show an inverted reality – revelations of the concealed architectural structures that define our own built environments.  The posts and beams, however, do not retain our focus for long as we are drawn to the alternating spaces behind them. These spaces vary from those that shimmer with organic strokes of colour to those left as empty fields of tone. 
Along with these more formalist artworks is a single light-box work that illuminates the text, ‘I don’t understand much about you. Just enough to know that we don’t see the universe the same way’.  While this work may appear an unusual addition, it could be the key to approaching Fortune’s latest show.  It suggests that Fortune intends for these works to be ‘read’ as a narrative rather than a medial exploration or neo-fluxist happening.  It prevents us from viewing them as minimalist or formalist studies on space, alerting us to an underlying textualisation for the exhibition. When considering the roughness of his timber beam paintings, they become revealing and nuanced.  They are neither accurately drawn nor abstractly simplified but rather liberal with conventions.  The forms are unmistakably representations of a reality while simultaneously physically unconvincing.  They taunt us as we try to complete them.  They are appealing as well as perplexing.

While not distorting reality they neither accurately represent it.  This is a point that Fortune claims as unimportant, yet is revealing for this reading.  He could, for example, have used photography, or digital media, or line drawings.  The friction here is in the space between realities and illusions.  We are being made aware that representations are flawed, that by painting a space it no longer exists.  The organic strokes of colour or specks of light in the background suggest a delight rather in the existential idea of space, of the universe as he sees it.  That what is substance is rough and unconvincing while what is beyond is free, if only able to be grasped at certain moments. 

​Neil Fortune’s latest exhibition asks us to engage with a narrative within space.  It invites us to delve into an existential ideology expounded through traditional conceptualism and modernist media.  While walking over Fortune’s judiciously cushioned textile strips, we are made to consider how real illusions in art are.  The physicality of the experience reveals Fortune’s determination to solidify space – to make it real.  To convince us, and possibly himself, that there is substance to our reality.  Rob Perrée writes ‘He wants the viewer to experience his works’, but isn’t all art, in any media, experienced?  Fortune is rather asking us to engage with his ideas while we experience his work.  This is what makes his work stimulating and at the same time difficult to comprehend, just as the universe really is.
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Review:  What is on the other side of the moon? 

​CONCEPT ART 2.0

Text: Rob Perrée 
​Amsterdam 2013
 
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The first time I saw work of Neil Fortune (1983, Georgetown, Guyana) was at the exchange exhibition Paramaribo Perspectives (2010) in TENT in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. A group exhibition as a result of an exchange between artists from Rotterdam and Suriname. Fortune was then still studying at the Rietveld Academie and in fact did not belong in that exhibition at all. He was, for reasons unclear to me, added later on. However, his installation which was without title, turned out to be an added value. He had painted the names of artists he admires on canvases of varying sizes. In a variety of colors and fonts. Some of these artists were Surinamese and were included in the exhibition (Remy Jungerman, Kurt Nahar, Iris Kensmil), and others were international (Lawrence Weiner,Richard Prince, Tracey Emin). The work functioned simultaneously as part of and as commentary on the exhibition. 


The exhibition drew boundaries, while the work of Fortune especially underlined the borderless nature of the art.
That the work could be interpreted in many ways – it could for example also be read as the ‘selling’ of other artists  – , proved to be no coincidence. That aspect would become the point of departure of the works that were to follow.Fortune makes installations which you could qualify as rough decors to which the viewer has to give his or her own interpretation. They are a kind of set pieces which are being brought to life by the presence and the activities of the ‘actor’. The invitation to the viewer can be hidden in a provocative banner, a text board or a light box (‘What is on the other side of the moon?’ and ‘I don’t understand much about you, just enough to know we don’t see the universe the same way.’), a title of an installation, the way in which the work is lit, the soft sitting mats which have been laid on the floor, or the pronounced incomplete finish.  He himself describes those works as models, as phases of a study which is awaiting interpretation or completion. Most of his drawings can, as a result thereof, hardly be seen as anything but sketches.Lately Neil Fortune paints. Paintings which can be characterized as architectural imaginations. Bare inner- and outer walls, openings in walls, corners, connecting beams etc. He paints them dry, as though it should not cost too much in paint. The linen shows through. His color range is very limited. He makes no effort to bring drops to a halt. They are in fact, two-dimensional variants of his installations. They have no content, they are open to content. They have no fixed meaning; Fortune provokes to give meaning to it. Texts can at times give the incentive thereto, but not necessarily. On one canvas he has even invited visitors at his studio to apply short texts or a catchy word.

The work of Fortune is a variation of the conceptual art of the sixties and seventies of the past century. For the conceptualists it was not about the outward appearance of a work, but about the underlying concept. That is why John Baldessari wrote provocative texts on a piece of wood, why Bruce Nauman recorded his movements in his studio on video and why Stanley Brouwn documented the distances he traveled in Amsterdam. They especially chose for this formless form, because they wanted to make their work ‘unattractive’ for the mighty museum world and for the, in their eyes, too commercial art market.Neil Fortune also presents a concept. To him it does not matter whether his work has an aesthetic or attractive look to it.  Contrary to his predecessors he turns to his viewers to give, and determine how to give, content and meaning to his concept. He puts his own authorship up for discussion.Many viewers will feel rather uncomfortable about that. 


They are used to looking at finished works which often give clear guidelines on how to interpret them. With Fortune they are activated to do something. To use their creativity and fantasy (‘What is there on the other side of the moon?’) or occasionally even to literally deliver their own personal input to the work. If they don’t, if in thinking and doing they continue keep their distance, then they will have to make do with the framework of an artwork.
Text: Rob Perrée, Amsterdam 2013


Picture

Sophia Holst -Neil Fortune- Ian Carr

In a bare white apartment, owned by Hercules Goulart Martins, Neil Fortune, Ian Carr, and Sophia Holst are redefining and inventing their works in relation to both the domestic space and the exhibition context. Though in this exhibition it is not so clear if it is their work that encroaches the house or the other way around. Neil Fortune's sculpture is made as an extension of the space and reminds us of a comfort zone in the house. It is like a temporary private territory, marked by the soft material which shows the potential to be reconfigured to the needs and wishes of the user. Fortune's work often deals with interventions and reactions to the immediate environment. He re-sculpts it with materials that are raw, sometimes rough and have the quality to, either by color, context or shape, be a reflection of the space. In contrast to Fortune's work, Ian Carr's sculptures and drawings are radically present. They do not in any way mirror the space, but they show a space on their own. Untitled (GFO)  recalls the form of a futuristic building with bulky steel and forward position. It carries a nostalgia of a past representing the future. Ian's work is more likely showing excerpts of exterior spaces, like cityscapes, rather than relations to the interior spaces. It proudly states and remains what it is even in the domestic ambience. Sophia Holst introduces a few objects in the apartment, including a lamp or at least the appearance of a lamp. With her interest in modernism and the modern interior, she investigates the relation between the functional and sculptural object. By doing so she uses raw materials in order to make plain configurations. The objects she makes seem to show an in-between stage of being, a point of balance, a rotated construction which appear to be accidental.

Text: Sophia Holst, Neil Fortune, Ian Carr 2012​



             Kansas City 

           

Consider time an infinite entity that consists of infinite numbers of moments. Time as something unlimited a mere conception of our minds. This time, time was set to pause, freezing pixels after pixels one dot after the next. Like a television screen, freezing multiple color one after the other red, green, blue and pink. While surroundings near by appeared asleep, as an unplugged conveyor belt quiet and soundless. The hell of time successfully injected its way into the human minds, dominating movement, conventions and emotions. The hell of time leaves our surroundings empty, it decayed our minds. The hell of time leaves bodies floating on the surface of the sea. It leaves open fields cold, black and motherless. 

The hell of times leaves bodies dry and empty on fields to rot. Visibly air was sucked out of the sky. The sky seems weak and lifeless as though an implosion was what had happened. My mind questioned how could I survive such terrible times? While in the sky, screaming clouds hang lower than anyone had ever seen. In my mind the clouds appeared like giant faces dark, blue and ugly, floating slightly above the sea. Blue faces drift over my body, as pink rain fall into the sea. Objects around seems compressed all white and lifeless—nothing moved, shivered, sailed on the sea, crawled, creep, walked, or run on the streets. The only things in motion were the flickering of lights.

My mouth wanted to shout, to shout for help, to scream, to scream my head off. But no sound would form from my words. I try to scream and shout, yet the words wouldn’t escape from my mind into the world. I thought only if I could wakeup this time to pee, this terrible dream might go away. I didn’t see any white rabbit last night, and beside this is not Kansas City.

Text: Neil Fortune  2011

 What did you expect to see? 

                                                                                                                                             

Was it art,   was it time,   was it money,   was it paint, frame or canvas,  was it something unexpected like death,   something rare,   something amazingly small,   was it love,  was it space or maybe walls,   was it peace,   was it joy,   was it hope,   was it freedom,   was it trust,   was it lines,   was it borders,   was it terror,   was it white blue and red,   was it the transformation from white to black,   maybe from life to death,   was it darkness or light,   was it the color blue,   was it the face of George Sallomon laying in a wooden box staring at you,   was it tears on my cheeks,   was it paint added to depict icons,   or conventional method to produce large canvas,   was it a long lecture on black history,   was it silence,   was it white sterile spaces,   was it large hallways,   narrow corridors’,    was it steps leading to evil thoughts,   was it that little snare on the above left,   or that dark space hanging over your shoulder,   was it me the artist in action,   was it the legendary ability of producing images,   was it freedom of speech,  or your foolish reflection on my canvas,   was it passion,   was it the birth of something new,   was it insanity,   or loyal just for the cause,   was it a picture of a person standing up one hands in his pocket,   was it something to make you feel better about your miserable self,   was it something to entertain you,   keep you busy from your dirty little habits,   was it something to cheer you up,   something erotic,   something strong,   white dark and ugly,   was it something to lift you from the floor on which you find your self  sinking,   was it heaven,   was it that place you call home, was it an image of your self,   was it a way to understand the world,   to understand history,   or to accept laws,   was it reality,   or more than reality can provide,   was it a balloon descending from the sky,   was it even of this world…….

Text: Neil Fortune 2009