La Torre

"La Torre" (2024) is a studio work in oil and spray on wood panel — the first work in which Neve uses oil paint, combining it with spray in a single surface

The subject is a single hand, grasping a knife by the blade.

. The meeting of the two techniques is not a stylistic exercise: it is a statement about where the work comes from and where it is going. The oil carries the classical tradition — the Baroque hand, the chiaroscuro, the centuries of painted flesh; the spray is the mark of another history, another formation. On this wood panel, they are the same thing. The hand is rendered in the manner of the classical masters — Caravaggio, Ribera, the full weight of seventeenth-century chiaroscuro — knuckles lit in white, palm deep in shadow, the fingers closed around the cutting edge of the blade with a grip that reads simultaneously as strength and as wound. The knife is a common kitchen knife, a black handle with two rivets, its blade running diagonally across the composition. Against the near-black ground, a scatter of orange-red dots fans out from the point of contact between blade and fingers: the spray, the mark of the street, the heat made visible at the threshold where the cut is happening. The work takes the Tarot card of The Tower — XVI, the major arcana of rupture, of the structure that must fall for what is true to emerge — as its conceptual frame. In the Tarot, The Tower does not mean simply destruction: it means the collapse of what was false, the radical and violent change that cannot be avoided. To grasp a knife by the blade is to hold on to what is hurting you — to choose the grip because you cannot release it, because the situation is the danger and the danger has become the situation. The orange sparks that leave the point of contact are not only blood: they are the moment of realisation, the light that only comes from the cut. The work is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity, hand-signed by the artist.