Neal Rock and Newbetter present: Hydan
A Newbetter and Faith Culture Collection project

25 May - 15 July 2006


Roquebrune, France 1952: Le Corbusier’s Cabanon was completed, fusing rustic domesticity with high Modernist detailing at the site of his eventual, mysterious death. In New York, the same year, Jackson Pollock executed the last of his monumental action paintings: Blue Poles No.11.
Pittsburgh 1968: George. A Romero finished filming the first of his ‘Dead’ series. In Paris, Roland Barthes completed his seminal essay ‘The Death of The Author’.

These two moments provide a conceptual framework to the collaboration between Newbetter (Joshua Bolchover, Shumon Basar, Parag Sharma) and British Artist Neal Rock, for Rock’s second exhibition at f a projects. Newbetter’s constructed environment houses the filmic contrivances of Rock’s silicon painted sculptures in a tableaux that owes as much to Le Corbusier’s Cabanon as it does to the later fabrication of Sam Raimi’s ‘The Evil Dead’ gore-effects.

Hydan 06#01 resurrects the building typology common both in the classical myth of architecture’s birth and in the history of the horror genre: the hut. Le Corbusier’s Cabanon – reminiscent of Abbe Laugier’s in 1755, or Heidegger’s in 1923 – signaled the persistence of original archetypes in resistance to the onslaught of modern construction materials such as glass, and its concomitant in-situ substance, silicon. Until the recent dominance of computer generated imagery, silicon has also been the material, par excellence, employed by the horror movie industry in manifesting the furthest aesthetic reaches of the monstrous imagination.
In a playful enjoyment with material and action, the once candy-coloured ‘process’ works of Rock’s Polari-Range now align themselves with the trickery and illusion of filmic SFX from the late 1970s & ‘80s. These moments, like many others in Hydan, play licentiously with the moist ideological playdough of today’s visual culture circus.
Hydan is a conflated, pidgin language that encounters both illusion and revelation in the annals of a fading Modernist project.

Neal Rock first presented his work at fa projects with ‘Work from the Polari Range’ in 2003. Since then he has received international attention with solo shows at Henry Urbach Architecture, New York. Kontainer Gallery Los Angeles , Grand Arts, Kansas City and Torch, Amsterdam (forthcoming). His work has also been included in the international group shows, ‘Expander’ Royal Academy of Arts, London. ‘Landscape Confection’ Wexner Centre, Ohio & Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. ‘Extreme Abstraction’ Albright Knox, Buffalo & ‘Flourish’ Moravia Gallery, Brno, Czech Republic.

Newbetter was founded in 2002 by writer/curator Shumon Basar, architect/curator Joshua Bochover and architect Parag Sharma. Based in London, Newbetter’s projects synthesize cultural production and criticism through a language borne of curatorial imperatives and architectural practices. Projects include Can Buildings Curate (2005- ), Remember Tomorrow: Hulme as Urban Myth (2004), Boutique (2003), Szuper Gallery Gallery (2002) and the forthcoming Airspace (2006). Newbetter have exhibited at The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; LOT, Bristol; Architectural Association, London; KW, Berlin; GZFK, Leipzig; and forthcoming shows will occur at the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery, Lausanne; and the Architecture Foundation, London. They have lectured internationally, and have been published about in Art Monthly, Art Review, The Independent, Blueprint, Domus, and Contemporary, amongst others.