In his solo show at Anderson Contemporary, HISTORY ON HOLD, Hans Neleman advances contemporary art on a modernist backbone. With an expressive and brilliantly harmonious construct, Neleman reminds us that we are a past not always recalled, we are pieces until connected, we are a history held in the pages torn from the devotion of experiences lived. Hans masters a beautifully lyrical language to deconstruct and reconnect the lives we chapter to memory to measure in our own, the lives now lived forever in a History on Hold.

It’s been more than 60 years since William Seitz debuted his groundbreaking exhibition “The Art of the Assemblage” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the exhibition’s catalog, Seitz pinpoints Picasso’s cubist Still Life with Chair as the avant-garde inception of collage and three-dimensional assemblage. The art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins subsequently declared collage “twentieth-century art’s most significant and characteristic innovation” that provided Picasso a battleground to contend artistic purity. Tomkins writes: “By gluing bits of paper, cloth and other fragments of the real world to the surface of their canvases, [Picasso and Braque] expand the attack on art’s imitative function and located “reality” all the more emphatically within the painting itself.” Collage, it seems, armed with what Seitz called its “rhythm of metaphoric destructions and reconstructions”, became art’s catalytic bullshit meter. The real in art, as in life, is not always obvious.

What is clear from Seitz’s showcase is that collage is not for the novice. It’s neither a beginning point, nor an end. It is artistic discovery in its most fluid posture. Almost all of the 140 artists who were included in that exhibit – from Arp and Dubuffet to Johns and Motherwell – were multi-discipline artists who used collage to inform and extend their painting and sculpture. Seitz provides a great example of this when describing Willem de Kooning’s iconic paintings of female figures, noting they were composed “with drawings which were “cut apart, reversed, exchanged and otherwise manipulated on the painting.”” Seitz posits: “Juxtaposition – taking form in neocubist fractures and misalignments which often resulted from the use of actual collage techniques – has played a considerable part in de Kooning’s development.” The real in art, as in life, is not always pretty.

Hans Neleman describes his own artistic development as a journey of connected events. Photography connected portraits; portraits connected history; history connected fragments of time and place; and those fragments connect sculpted assemblies to build something new, something real. It is from this new real – this redeemed, reconstructed, reclaimed real – that Neleman also paints. He could not paint this without his photography, without his collage and assemblage, without an experience of connected events. Neleman has lived his art, and because of that it is real.

When Neleman was showing me his inspiration wall filled with pictures and torn prints, he described how much time he spends with his paintings… and the stress he feels when he starts to doubt whether or not he’s getting it right, how to start, when to finish, has it become what he intended it to be… and what I heard in that was painting’s virtue. He had remarked how collage provided the opportunity to not only build an image, but to go back and rebuild it again by simply moving the pieces around. It’s not the same stress. It’s almost as though collage is meant to be disrupted, to do over, to pattern or even dismiss a thought or intention. But painting desires a different truth. It’s not meant to be undone. Like history, like those pages Neleman tears from books to collage a present from the past, painting is an absolute. Painting is the moment of intention that will never be anything else. That’s a very vulnerable reflection for an artist, or anyone for that matter. Perhaps that is why these paintings feel personal. There is nothing there to be undone.

- Patrick Theimer, Art Collector.