Carmen Neely & Enrique Norten

Mariane Ibrahim invites you to the conversation between Carmen Neely and Enrique Norten, Mexican architect and founder of TEN Arquitectos.

They will reflect on how memory, speech, and feeling intertwine and transform over time, understanding the marks in her work as a sincere attempt to solve real problems in the expression of one's own history and of those stories that are transmitted through us.

The talk will include a visit to the exhibition a trace beyond the life of the body.

Neely’s canvases are surfaces taught with conflict, line, color and language. The marks ricochet and collide off one another, their meanings always affected by their proximity to other gestures. In Neely’s paintings, memory, speech, and feeling are not necessarily linear or discrete expressions and experiences but are rather codependent on a series of contexts that produce, interrupt and re-form them over time.

Her paintings give a feeling of catharsis, bursting with colorful and calligraphic strokes on delicate and soft backgrounds. The tableaus propose the peace that comes through an ongoing process of renegotiation and reiteration. If each line holds expressions of identity, values, and memory passed through generations of family and friendships, Neely’s consistent modulation of gesture and color in her own vernacular suggest the mutability and evolution of these values over time and geography. The process is about  intricacies of interpretation with the resulting works expressing a methodological approach to language that remains vulnerable to Neely’s own ongoing confrontation with selfhood.

—Mariane Ibrahim