The author and critic John Reed describes Neel’s paintings as “boldly dismissive of distinctions between abstraction and representation. Landscape and figure grow out of abstraction, and at the same time, decay into abstraction—an abstraction that represents not so much the geometry of forms as the insanity of perceiving. In this new millennia of painting, Neel has distilled a methodology as fully cognizant of digital imagery and the position of the cinematic camera, as it is of the course of art history. “Every painting I make is a reference to every painting made before,” says Neel."
