Pruz

A portrait in oil — the beginning of a new material research, intimate and concentrated.

Pruz is an oil on wood panel, created in May 2024.

"Pruz" is an oil portrait on wood panel painted in May 2024 — part of the same cycle of technical research with oil paint that Neve began in early 2024, exploring a medium and a pictorial tradition that until this period he had worked in only through pencil and spray. The subject is a young man — Pruz — portrayed from the chest up, in three-quarter view, looking directly at the viewer with an expression of composed attention. He wears a black hooded sweatshirt, hood up, over a green quilted jacket, with a red t-shirt visible at the collar. Around his neck, a brown wooden mala — Buddhist prayer beads, with a small yellow tassel pendant. In his hand, held loosely at chest level, a lit cigarette. Behind his left shoulder, slightly blurred into the landscape, a brown-and-white hunting dog — a pointer or similar hound — stands alert, looking into the middle distance. The background is a muted outdoor landscape: grey overcast sky, a dark earth field, the suggestion of low vegetation at the horizon — the kind of flat, open terrain of a winter or late-autumn day in the Po Valley or similar northern lowland. The painting follows the logic of the classical oil portrait, but the technique is openly that of someone learning the medium through direct encounter with it: the face is built up with confident, fluid brushwork — the flesh tones layered over dark ground, the lights placed with certainty, the beard rendered hair by hair — while other passages (the background, the jacket) remain more gestural, more openly painted, the brushmarks visible. This coexistence of finish and openness is not unresolved: it is characteristic of the period, of a painter finding where the medium asks for precision and where it does not. The mala at the subject's neck — wooden beads worn against the skin — carries a different register than the cigarette: the contemplative against the casual, the spiritual practice against the street habit. Together they describe a figure who holds these registers simultaneously, without contradiction. The work was painted over approximately ten days, from May 2 to May 12, 2024. The details photographed during the process — the face at an early stage (May 2), the hand and cigarette mid-way (May 7), the face near completion (May 8) — record the layering process of the medium: how oil builds depth through time, how the face accumulates rather than being placed all at once.