The Rat

The rat — an unlikely protagonist, rendered with the same precision as a myth.

The Rat is a studio work by artist Neve, pencils on MDF, created in 2016.

"The Rat" is a pencils on MDF from 2016, built — like "Drift" — on sacred geometry as its invisible structural armature. The subject is abduction: in Italian, "ratto" is both the animal and the ancient word for rapimento — seizure, taking, the sudden removal of a person from where they stood. The visual tradition is long: the Rape of the Sabine Women in Giambologna's marble, in Poussin's painting, in every version that tries to render as composition what is in fact a centrifugal chaos. Many bodies, one center. Here the center is a woman — her back to the viewer, seen from behind, arms raised as if still reaching for the moment before this one. Around her, five or six figures press in, pull down, grasp — their bodies forming a vortex that rotates around her. The illumination is selective and sharp: the central back glows against the deep black, the surrounding figures emerge from darkness and return to it. The composition is at once a pile and a pattern, the disorder of bodies organized by the geometry beneath. The relation to "Drift" is direct: both works show the human form caught in a mass — in drift, in pull, in the force of other bodies. Both are built on sacred geometry, the abstract proportional order that underlies the apparent chaos. In "Drift" the bodies fall; here they spiral. The subject is the same: the individual inside a force larger than themselves, the search for an axis that keeps moving. "Ricerca" — the word means both research and search. The work is the search for form in chaos, and the chaos is the condition of the search.