Neil Stalnaker at Galerie Ça Bon

ニール・ストルネイカー
January 11 ~ 30, 2020
Galerie Ça Bon
1-15-16 Hiroo, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo Shibuya Bridge A Building 1F
Shibuya, Tokyo 150-0012
03-6277-0552
www.cabon.jp

In the summer of 1957, at the Five Spot jazz club in Manhattan, the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane created daily queues almost halfway around the block of jazz aficionados eager to hear that modern music.

Inside the club in the small hall amid the smoke emanating from hundreds of cigarettes, pipes, and cigars, it was possible to recognize artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Klein, Paul Jenkins, and Mark Rothko, representatives of the school of abstract expressionism, the artistic movement that emerged in post-WWII culture. Their art fits perfectly into the concept of that elaborate, expressive, yet improvised music that Monk and Coltrane were making.

Neil Stalnaker is a great representative of both music and art. As a musician and a painter, Neil knows how to tell a story. His current exhibition at the Galerie Ça Bon in Ebisu, tells the story of a true artist.

A four-time survivor of throat cancer that prevents him from expressing himself artistically through the trumpet, his first instrument, Neil began, like an authentic and sincere artist, to overcome the barriers of the cancer and find a way with brushes, paints, and canvas towards a new way of artistic expression (which is good for us). He treats the exhibition as a music album, a collection of songs that tell us a story.  Every painting on the exhibition has a card explaining the meaning of that particular painting and what the inspiration was for it.

Because they are telling a story, the paints have some variations in colors and strokes — some delicate, some strong, some spacey, some compact. He uses rhythms and tones, space and time, the musical approach moving easily into visuals. Sometimes he needs just a duet of colors; sometimes he needs a quartet, a quintet, and sometimes he needs an entire big band. One can say that Neil Stalnaker paints are music for the eyes, for the ears, and for the heart.

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