Reviews

If you are tired of the kind of art characterised by Kim Howells (the Minister for Tourism, film and broadcasting) as "conceptual bull", you might find Niel Bally's exhibition of recent paintings more appealing. Most of the 45 pieces date from the last three years and all since Bally returned to his home town of Talgarth in 1996

The brochure to the exhibition rightly directs us to allow the paintings to reveal themselves slowly, for us to pause, stop, so that the more we look the more we might see. It sounds obvious advice when looking at art, but we have become so numbed by contemporary art as sensationalism rather than sensation, as media sound (and vision) bites, bolstered by often pseudo-intellectual clutter and cultural noise of one kind and another, the artists as showbiz celebreties, even jesters, that we sometimes have to be reminded to go back to basics.

At Brecon Museum it is refreshing to be in an exhibition of paintings of relative silence, with art that isn't screaming or yobish or making "in your face" demands for attention or being self obsessed in striving for originality. Bally's work is at the opposite end of the spectrum, as far from the madding crowd and the brat pack as you can hope to be. In Bally's paintings nothing is detached, nothing is dogmatically abstract. Nor is there anything ideological about them, no sence of the paintings promoting or illustrating a theory,propganda, message or moral. Instead he is interested in "still life' and what he calls "still time". The titles of Bally's paintings tell us most about his intentions: Traces, Flow, Melt, Passing, Probe, Ravine. Apart from one self-portrait - Hello,50 - drawn to coincide with his 50th birthday two years ago, human figures do not make an appearance in these works.

What Bally is seeking to evoke in his paintings of landscape surfaces is what James Joyce described in a very different context as "epiphanies". Their meanings are intrinsic to themselves, but are only revealed to us as we take time to view them. Take them slowly, pause, don't rush, and the more you look the more you will see.

The Western Mail 21 January 2003 by Martin Shipton

Niel Bally's paintings reveal themselves gradually and the viewer is compelled to slow down, to pause, to stop. We can't quite decide how to get a hold on what we are seeing. It is clear we are not being told how to read these paintings, there is room fo our own interpretations. So we are left to complete the picture.

What we seem to be able to see are histories. A history of the process of making the pictures as much as a history of painting. The pices refer back to a continuum of painting - from rough pre-historic marks on a cave wall through the delicate and flat painting of a petal, to a hard crisp line and finally to the weave of a canvas beneath. Niel Bally is fascinated by natural surfaces- visible shapes and colours which happen in spite of themselves - ambiguous forms which literally grow, such as fungus, moss, lichen and rust. His various uses of process seek to make equivalents of this apparent randomness, but they are not direct copies. This in itself is a challenge. The more we look, the more we see evidence of the labour involved in these paintings, and the hand and tools that have been at work. The textures have been modified and become suggestive of doors, panels, planks, walls, screens and sometimes windows. We might choose to read these elements as metaphors, but if we do and if they are doors, are we on the inside or on the outside?

The pictures in this exhibition span a period of time between 1997 and present. During this time Niel Bally has pushed his investigation of surfaces further. He says "I am drawn towards natural surfaces combined with random or unselfconscious man made marks. For example, a table top with its natural wood grain, marks scattered over it leaving a film of frozen moments like a photograph, traces of time, evidence that someone has been present and left their mark." Sometimes there are small clues which offer us a reading of the surface and a position - such as the bullet shapes on a box lid in Balkans. In other paintings we can't be as clear. We almost see a picture of a picture, a mirror of reality and we are reminded of the space we actually occupy - the experience of standing in front of a painting before we begin our journey.

Matthew Richardson Brecon Exhibition brochure 2002

Veiled Allusions

The latest show at the enterprising Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery is an exhibition of abstract paintings and monoprints by Niel Bally. The images were triggered by natural phenomena such as lichen, seaweed and rust, but also by the patina of human marks, old wooden doors and crates.

They are fascinating, handsome and often lovely, and all were done within the last five years. Many of the paintings are "seen" through parallel vertical layers: Niel calls them "screens". He has a sure grounding in the academic principles of drawing and consequently, soft and mysterious as it is, much of his work has an underlying structure that gives it great power. In some paintings, such as Balkans, there are pithy political comments from someone who, although he lives in the quiet countryside near Brecon, inhabits no ivory tower. Niel trained at the Ruskin and West Surrey College, but says he learnt how to articulate what he wanted by teaching, which he did in London and Canterbury during the 70's and 80's. Spells in Mexico and South Africa allowed him to paint freely on a small budget and in the 90's he moved back to the Welsh Marches where he spent his childhood.

"It took me 25 years to paint in a modernist style", he tells me as we look at the frameless, five foot wide canvases and the smaller, glazed and mounted boards laid out for hanging. "What I am trying to do is make a 'space' within the paintings; I've always used veils of paint, I like the transparency they give; I'm an allusive painter not a descriptive one." Conversely, Niel says, "I don't like hard-edged painting that you can't get into."

This work is a radical change from the flaming landscapes and still lives he was making in Oaxaca and the Cape. Generally more sober in colour there are striking exceptions such as Flaw and the orange and lime green lichen pictures on a black background. It is hard not to make connections: Braque ("The first modernist I really took to"), Ben Nicholson ("He was rammed down our throats but his work is great"), Calum Innes, Patrick Heron. The comparison game is addictive: I see Barnett Newman and Ernst' frottages, but this work stands up fine by itself.

Caroline Juler "Galleries" February 2003

Opening address by David Haste:
Exhibition at Brecon Museum:18th January 2003

In the brochure to this exhibition Mathew Richardson has rightly directed us to allow Niel's paintings to reveal themselves slowly, for us to pause, stop, so that the more we look the more we might see. If we are to engage with these paintings this is exactly what we should do. It sounds obvious advice when looking at paintings but we have become so numbed by contemporary art as sensationalism rather than sensation, as media sound bites, bolstered by intellectual clutter and cultural noise of one kind or the other, the artists as show-biz celebrities, and of course the obligatory subversion that is claimed for all art at the "cutting edge" , that great cliche of the 1990s. The perpetual shock of the new. But the real shock is the shocking imperviousness to shock itself, of never being genuinely shocked by art in any profound way any more. But that's what orthodoxy now tells us art is, officially approved art, the art of the new establishment whether at Tate Modern, Arts Council, the Turner Prize, or the Joplings of late Saatchism, art is expected to contain this mandatory smidgen of shock, some hollow rebellion without which it is not legitimate as art.

How refreshing then to be in an exhibition of paintings, of relative silence, art that isn't screaming, or yobbish, or making "in your face" demands for attention or being self obsessed in striving for originality. This exhibition is at the opposite end of the spectrum as far from the madding crowd and the brat pack as you can hope to be. These paintings make very different demands.

This is an exhibition of an artist entering his mature phase of production after a long working life as a painter, over thirty years of development, years in which he has enjoyed great success as well as having to face crushing disappointments, there have been opportunities and risks aplenty, chances lost and false leads followed but throughout it all a momentum has been maintained and those wonderful critical moments when painter and audience see "completion" , when image and painting are at one and right. It hasn't been a smooth journey for Niel, but one that is now yielding riches from that experience. In the sense that Robert Macdonald, writing about the work in 1998, described "how things surfaced" and how Niel draws "on a large bank of visual memories".

I have had the privilege of Niel's friendship ever since 1978 and have witnessed some of those experiences, I share a few of the memories and have seen his paintings evolve to the work we see today. The paintings are mostly from the past three years but include subjects and elements that have characterised Niel's paintings throughout those thirty years.

Niel is a painter. He is not an intellectual painter neither is he a metaphysical painter, there is nothing detached, nothing dogmatically abstract in his paintings. Nor is there anything ideological about them either, no sense of the paintings promoting or illustrating a theory, propaganda, a message or a moral. Ever since his earlier student days his favourite painters have remained the colourists of the late French School from the first quarter of the 20th century, in particular Henri Matisse. For Niel painting has always been a continuous exploration through the infinite possibilities of sensing, moulding, manipulating the stuff, the matter, colour and line, scale, surface tension and texture, the spaces assumed or imagined. The very language and means of painting itself. To these ends he was content to operate within the traditional genre of landscape and still life.

Niel's paintings suggest a presence and several of them intimate traces of human occupation. He is a very gregarious character, has a wide circle of friends and revels in social contact, he is generous and has a genuine affection for people but the human image or figure plays no part in any of his paintings. He has allowed himself one exception to this rule with the small self portrait drawing by which he celebrated his fiftieth birthday as well as to see if he could still draw!

Niel is attracted to the tension created by opposites, the mirror revealing two sides of reality, the object and the reflection, the open and closed, freedom and constraint, precision and apparent liberty, the here and there, the inside and outside, materiality and imagination, substance and insubstantiality; bouncing between these opposites there is a constant dialogue between convergent and divergent motifs in his paintings appearing and disappearing. All very much like the British artist in whose steps I believe he follows. Ben Nicholson. Although there is little formal resemblances in their work, nor should there be, the one contemporary with the golden age of Modernism the other seventy years later well on the other side of whatever's left of Modernism, they never the less share a parallel set of compulsions and understanding as artists, particularly in their obsession with and application of still life. Superficially there are formal links with the paintings of the American painter Richard Diebenkorn but Diebenkorn painted the skies and ocean of California, and in all his landscapes Niel has paid scant attention to the sky, that ever changing dynamic of light and climate, it was as if it seemed too animated for his tastes. It was the still forms that attracted him, the mountain, path, field, burrow and it was to still life that Niel reoriented his work when he called a halt to his Paddington Africa Series and returned to Wales in 1997. Here he spoke of making painting about still life, and about what he called "still time". First with the objects on the table the window beyond, then the table top tilted as it did for Nicholson obliterating or fusing the landscape beyond but allowing the landscape colours and light to penetrate the painting. The table top tilted right up into the vertical to become a closed space, a shutter, a closed door, a barricaded window, a bunker wall, planking, a screen, a surface. The landscape had indeed become the surface. The surface of the painting a kind of landscape for Niel to travel on in whatever direction he pleased. When he had come home to Wales he had what he called "chucked out the baggage" which gave him the release to paint, scrape, wash across and into the surface of his paintings, leave flat deep puddles of acrylic paint, rivulets and pools of warm earth colours, drag the colour, juxtapose oil and water, leave traces, textures, marks, hieroglyphs and gentle outlines of familiar objects at hand in the studio or silhouettes of bullets and bayonets as in his painting "Balkans" painted in the year 2000.

The titles of his paintings tell of the same story, Traces, Flaw, Melt, Passing, Probe, Ravine, Burnt Hill. In these paintings, on these surfaces he lays down screeds of paint, thin washes, tilting the canvas one way and the other, leaving fissures and illusory relief, allusions to landscape, evocations of things half remembered and gentle echoes of reflected forms, tree bark, hillsides, barn doors, moss covered walls and rocks, fences, fields but, no horizon, no sky; in some paintings not only omitting but blocking out the light with black paint, and in gaps and between areas of colour creating silhouettes and shadows, both of which are flat two dimensional entities and the very antithesis of light. The space is exclusively a surface space, two-dimensional, a picture space, the verticals reinforcing the finite density of the painting, denying us a view other than that of the surface itself, complete, its presence and its history as one, stilled life in stilled time, layer upon layer, the surface has become everything, as it might be seen in the strata of rock, as indeed as a metaphor for life itself. Once again take Mathew Richardson's advice, let the paintings reveal themselves to you, let the layers unpeel, take them slowly, pause, don't rush and the more you look the more you'll see. And on that positive recommendation I formally declare the exhibition open with the sincere wish that you will enjoy the paintings.

David Haste January 2003 Copyright