Neal Palmer - Modernist Tendencies

Modernist Tendencies: Between Seeing and Looking
By Dina Jezdić

A pale ribbon of lavender cuts across the canvas, slicing through a sea of olive green and into soft charcoal shadow. In Modernist Tendencies, Neal Palmer transforms flax, rendering it as a glowing fragment, pulsing with concentrated intensity. The plant curls inward, folding upon itself in a slow botanical choreography. A single vein deepens and stretches until it becomes a river, winding across the surface with deliberate insistence. A restrained drama plays out in these arrangements.

Each painting frames its subject, speaking in a visual tongue that flirts with abstraction yet remains rooted in the plant’s rhythm and structure. Surfaces catch and release light, while forms shift softly in and out of focus, inviting the viewer into a hush of attention. The works draw from modernism’s language: diagonal lines emerge, planes overlap, and every element is placed with purposeful care. Named simply from Composition I to Composition XVI, the series holds the clear restraint of early twentieth-century abstraction, where formal exactness and sensory richness exist in delicate balance.

Beneath the surface of these works, a language unfolds. Palmer wields the tools of modernism: geometry, repetition, exact lines, but reimagines them as gestures of softness: the gentle play of light upon skin, the hushed stillness of attentive seeing, the gradual gathering of emotion beneath form. Where modernism strips away, Palmer layers and saturates. His close framing pulls the viewer into a near-cinematic intimacy. Shapes blur and textures bloom, flax folds thick and dense, resembling woven sinew or cloth, alive with tactile presence. It is within this tension between order and feeling, between clarity and depth, that the paintings find their voice and begin to speak.

Phormium tenax is no flax in the biological sense but a lily, native to Aotearoa. Its long leaves rise like swords, arranged in fans where the central rito, or new shoot, stands guarded by the parent leaves, a pattern that echoes the bonds of family. For Māori, harakeke is far more than a plant. It holds knowledge, serves as a resource, and carries whakapapa. Used in weaving, healing, and ceremony, it is harvested with care and respect. Palmer does not depict this explicitly, yet it hums through the work in the way he lingers on each leaf, rendering them with a tactile reverence. His work reaches beyond ethnobotany into something devotional, almost ritual. These paintings are warm and bodily, inviting stillness and offering space for meditation. By returning to each canvas as a farmer might to the soil, Palmer sweeps wide brushes through wet pigment, softening sharp edges, breaking lines, and letting the surface breathe.

Perhaps this is a soft rebellion, born in a time marked by ecological uncertainty. Turning toward the more-than-human world becomes an act heavy with meaning, reminding us of our deep and tangled connection to all that surrounds us.

At its heart, Modernist Tendencies draws attention not just to the plant, but to the act of looking itself. It is a practice of sustained attention, of remaining with something long enough for it to shift, and to reveal new dimensions.

Here, harakeke refuses to be reduced to mere specimen. It stands as presence itself, a living, unfolding encounter, one of gentle majesty.