Neil Raitt

Neil Raitt’s pictorial world, conclusively presented in the artist’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Judin, poses numerous riddles. What is a snow-covered mountain hut doing under palm trees? How could man-sized cacti grow alongside frosty mountain lakes? Why does a glowing red sun shine through a starry night? Why do some of these motifs repeat themselves wallpaper-like – and are these sequences the identical motif at all, or is our eye playing tricks on us? And finally, why, despite all the indications of civilization, are we permanently looking into uninhabited scenes? But above all, we wonder why a young British painter obsesses over American landscape clichés, thus scrutinizing our perception thereof?

Truth be told, Neil Raitt has been fantasizing about by the land of unlimited opportunities and boundless landscapes since his youth. He is equally fascinated by the wide range of artistic traditions within the relatively short cultural history of the U.S., where even Sunday painting or supposedly “naïve” art command consideration. In view of these affinities, it is not surprising that Bob Ross, the maker of the legendary TV series The Joy of Painting, became the young painter’s hero. Around about the time Raitt finished his studies, Ross’ palette of American landscapes – from the palm-studded beaches on the Pacific Coast, to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the East – starts to feature in his own works. He adopts Ross’s color schemes and style, and even his famous “happy accidents.” But he doesn’t stop at citing this mélange of patriotism, nostalgia, and kitsch. With the paintings on display, all of which were created this year, he transposes the well-known into the strange. He repeats and changes motifs and combines mutually exclusive images. Surprisingly, this creates patterns and labyrinths that are right on the pulse of the digital age. Raitt’s pleasurable repetitions are neither artificial nor lifeless. On the contrary, his compositions are wonderfully painterly, at times downright impasto. Through this “give one’s all” painting and the refraction and disintegration of the motifs, several major questions arise. Such as that of the thin line between art and kitsch. Raitt himself explained to curator Mark Gisbourne, “I like to get things as close to kitsch as possible, yet not quite crossing the line, but playing with it.” This play with our expectations in this regard, as well as the contrast between “wild” nature and civilization, results in a tense examination of Romanticism and our, often very misleading, ideas about this artistic-philosophical phenomenon. In his essay for the catalog that accompanies our exhibition, Mark Gisbourne has addressed this tension – and appropriately described Raitt’s approach as “romantic irony.”

Neil Raitt was born in Leicester in 1986. He studied art at Norwich University College of the Arts and then painting at the Royal College of Art in London. Since then, Raitt has lived and worked in London. In 2014, the Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas hosted his first major solo exhibition. Subsequently, his work has been featured in a number of international solo and group exhibitions, including the Halle des bouchers in Vienne, the Villa Du Parc centre d’art contemporain in Annemasse, and the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago. Works by Raitt have found a home in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the DePaul Art Museum in Chicago, among others.