Artist Spotlight is our regular feature introducing you to Cities and Memory artists around the world with an in-depth interview. In this edition, we introduce you to French painter, sound and video artist Philippe Neau, inspired by water, vibrations, accidents, nature time and space, and a long-time Cities and Memory contributor. 

I’ve been painting since 1990. I’ve always painted. I don’t have enough time to do more, to paint more. My painting is quite “open”, meaning it’s not always on a canvas or a frame. It’s sometimes in space. It takes different forms, pictorial installations. I’ve taken over corners of the land, the garden. I sometimes let things happen.

Interaction with nature, time, the natural rhythm, the weather… I work with space, colour, material, the dynamics of forms and supports in space and their interactions, the relationship to the place and the spectators.

Sound appeared in the 2000s in installations and videos. I included it to give more power to my paintings and installations, to the images reworked into videos. My idea was also to include the spectator more through this. And I used it more and more. I’m not a trained musician, so I gravitated toward ambient, natural, and urban sounds, from museums and streets.

My painting, like my music, draws inspiration from what’s happening in the studio or the garden: around me.

Some recent paintings to give you an idea: https://philippeneaupeinture.blogspot.com/2024/01/2024-peinture-printemps_5.html https://philippeneaupeinture.blogspot.com/2024/01/2024-ete-installation-7-work-in-progress.html

https://philippeneaupeinture.blogspot.com/2024/01/2024-peinture-ete_57.html https://philippeneaupeinture.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-peinture-printempsete-moments.html

https://philippeneaupeinture.blogspot.com/2022/01/2022-ete-sculptures-1-7.html

In music, I work from sounds captured around me, with a preference for for natural sounds, those of the garden (wind, birds, trees, water, etc.). What attracts me is to start from reality, from real space, from sounds or atmospheres to create or recreate an imaginary landscape, almost abstract at times. It’s a bit like being in the head, between the ears, and hearing many moments at the same time.

All the layers overlap, connect, and recreate a place, a kind of “mental landscape.” I participate in collective projects. I have two regular collaborative projects: CollAGE D (with Romain aka Le Crapaud from the band Le Crapaud et la Morue) and STALSK (with Arnaud aka Innocent But Guilty). I collaborate with other musicians regularly, such as Antonella Eye Porcelluzzi, Grosso Gadgetto, etc.

These collaborations take the form of a single piece (remix, recomposition, tribute) or an album. I like working and interacting like this, with the idea of ​​surprising myself, of doing something different with melody, rhythm, and voices. My music doesn’t have that rhythm or melody, or very little of it, so very little.

I’m quite proud of these projects:

https://philippeneau.bandcamp.com/album/before-and-after-silence https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/terres-sonores https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/hors-sols

I also like this project, a mix of surveillance camera and soundtrack: I created a 44-minute piece, like a stroll through an icy landscape? Cold? The camera changes from time to time, depending on its operating status… It’s been shown in several locations since it was posted online. I like this idea of ​​variation and evolution. Projecting yourself into a distant place, just through the view, the music…

https://www.acousticcameras.org/playlist/nobodisoundz/

Also, this rewriting work based on the sounds of :zoviet*France (an English band I really like): https://soundcloud.com/nobodisoundz/inside-ice-wind-fence-oak-leaves-dropped-into-horsetail-ponds-at-walltown-sur-reve

I live in a small town in the west of France near a river and a grove.

I’ve always listened to a lot of music, very different things (loud, abstract, experimental, angry, energetic, etc.). Gradually, for reasons related to painting and installations, sound entered my regular practice. To give it strength, another colour.

At first, it was an integral part of the installations. It was more about sampling excerpts from pieces I liked (a voice, a rhythm, etc.), but soon I wanted to experiment and create my own sounds. I turned to my environment. These sounds were and are more accessible.

As in painting, I use what’s there, at hand, beneath the ear, at the moment. Natural or urban sounds, noises, sometimes instrumental notes, voices (conversations, whispers)… Everything interests me.

It all depends on the idea, or rather, it’s often the sounds that trigger the idea, just as the material, the support, the texture generates the painting… Sometimes these sounds sleep in the machine’s storage space, vaguely forgotten. And one day they come out, as good as new.

I like to be surprised, to discover something that wasn’t expected or anticipated, whether it’s in the act of making something (painting, video, or music). I try to be attentive to “accidents” (as Francis Bacon describes them), to the more or less “chance” encounter.

Be attentive to “doing,” to being in the “doing,” that is, to being within it, within the sound or pictorial material. And try to let yourself be carried away by this act of making, setting reason aside (in the sense Jackson Pollock describes it).

Rather this one: hORs SoLs. It’s the last album released. It was released by Mahorka. I see or saw it as a recomposition of landscapes, imaginary soundscapes recreated from field sounds of different existing places. The image on the cover replays this: superimpositions of landscape fragments.

Each piece has its own image. These are not illustrations, really autonomous images that offer a vision of a mental landscape. I like this idea of ​​creating a visual or sound image from or by imagining oneself to be in a head, a mind. A bit like the fruit of memory or a possible combination.

It can be found here: https://mahorka.bandcamp.com/album/hors-sols

Here is the presentation text that I wrote for the label:

“I started with sounds from different places: the house, the garden, the workshop, the forest next door in Mayenne, the beach or the ocean in Vendéen near the family home, holiday spots, museums… several places therefore, several sounds, noises… Rather than playing them and working on them by place, I associated them, mixed them to create a “new sound place”… a bit like memory could work or does work, my memory… sounds that flow, in cascade. Or rather like informal links or sort of echoes or even rhizomes that put together, create a fragment of “landscape from nowhere” and at the same time from everywhere and next door. How to say: we identify: wind, birds, footsteps, voices, etc. These sounds do not belong to a single place and do not offer a sound vision of a particular place (as for “Étant donne”). It is rather a question of “visualizing”, making sensitive, perceptible (sound) the “images” of landscape and their experiences that the brain, memory, head formulate afterwards. After the physical and sound experience of the place. I tried to give form to this place – these imaginary places, these moving and dense places, which exist in my head when thoughts escape, emancipate themselves from concrete reality and wander and live by themselves Like spatio-mental capsules (?) … Each would offer an “immobile journey” (Julien Gracq), internal or interior (Kandinsky) That is why the title would be hORs SoLs.”

Here’s what I wrote after making this piece for Sound Photography: “The skeleton of an armchair rests along the shore of the Salton Sea in Bombay Beach, California, in 2014. The Salton Sea was formed in the early 1900s when the Colorado River breached an irrigation canal, creating a large lake in the middle of the Southern California desert. The area became a thriving resort, but as agricultural runoff gradually accumulated in the lake’s waters, the Salton Sea became toxic, driving away tourists and wildlife. The area is now a shadow of its former self.”

The image, the armchair, the deserted place, the heat, the life gone or waiting… Memory and the perception of a life past, forgotten, or in the making are effects I felt while looking at the image. Starting with the sight to imagine the sound.

I listen to very different things, varying depending on the time, place, or what I’m doing. So it’s complicated for me to explain everything, but I can make a sort of list with a few words from time to time.

I recently discovered: Pure H (Tetragram), Mélia Roger (sound artist), Bruno Duplant, David Berezan (Mornings), Bruno Bernard I listen to often or periodically: The Young Gods (so varied!), :zoviet*France, The Bug, Pole, Brian Eno (Music for Apollo), Vaino K, Forest Thoughts by OVOD, the original version of the Chernobyl series, Head, Grosso Gadgetto, Innocent But Guilty, Jordan Prestot, Nouvelles Lectures Cosmopolites, Christophe Bailleau, Konedjo, Stéphane Marin, Pierre Schaeffer, Sonic Youth, Le Crapaud et la Morue, Seefeel, Philippe Lamy (a painter with whom I’ve collaborated twice), DJ Spooky, Painkiller, David Lynch, The Black Dog, Fossil Aerosol Mining Project, Lull, Rythm&Sounds, the Kilimanjaro DarkJazz Ensemble, Chris Watson, KMRU, Ghost Dubs, Autechre, Kim Gordon, Radian, Squaremetter, Nearly God, King Midas Sound… label releases: Mahorka, Unfathomless.

Many sounds fascinate me either because they are evocative or evoke an imaginary world, a mystery. The sounds of water, the sea, the ocean, ice, or glaciers. I’m drawn to these sounds, I don’t really know why. I’d like to do some work around them.

Some time ago, I applied to go on a boat trip to Antarctica. I’m going to buy an underwater microphone soon. Deep, dark, cavernous spaces with bass tones speak to me. Deep, powerful sounds attract me. Vibrations. Reverb. Or even the sounds of the forest, the sounds of trees, the woods. Night also fascinates me in a natural setting, with trees, among trees.

Personally, I have fairly simple and rudimentary equipment. I’m not really attracted or fascinated by technology. I use my phone more regularly to record sounds.

It’s with me all the time, light and practical. I have a Zoom microphone (but it’s heavy compared to the other one). I compose with Audacity and Ableton Live. I switch between them depending on ideas and projects. It has to be practical and fast. The main thing is to capture the sounds and make them 😊

I have several “albums,” or rather groups of songs, in progress. I’m making progress slowly… I’m participating in compilations or remixes.

I’m preparing an installation for a group exhibition in Angers in September. Soon, I’ll have more time to paint… the holidays are coming.