Neil Moore began painting seriously in 1989, shortly after his arrival in Italy. From the start his work showed a commitment to a European tradition but interpreted with a freedom and an appreciation of the contemporary that locate them firmly in the present. The high technical level works to establish the credibility of imagery that blends themes taken from history and mythology with preoccupations, even obsessions, of an often highly personal nature. The artist’s debt to Surrealism is clear, but his command of the representational capacity of oil paint and love for the fall of light link him to older and more subtle antecedents.

In particular, his play on the proportions of male and female bodies and the related distortion of perspective and pictorial space have allowed him to establish a kind of private world in which references to the past and an acute eye for the details of the present are fused into images of refinement and power. While the delight that he takes in the simple depiction of things is everywhere apparent, the human body is at the centre of Neil’s work, rigorously investigated but also sensuously evoked. The surface realism in these paintings is a vehicle for themes that are both compelling and disturbing, worked into images of strange power and compelling beauty.