COLUMBUS CIRCLE & 60th STREET
32" x 58" oil/linen
private collection
"Imagine a sparkling clean city where the sun is always shining, the streets are wide-open, the sidewalks are roomy, and blue sky goes on for miles. This is Robert Neffson’s New York City. In this appealing series of photorealist paintings of Manhattan, Neffson gives the city the crispness and airiness of a bright, early weekend morning, before the streets buzz with activity. But these scenes don’t take place in the morning. Pedestrians carry shopping bags, stores are open for business, and the sunshine beams from the west. Even when the streets are crowded, they seem tidy and boundless.
It’s not that Neffson scrubbed the city clean or even radically idealized it. Rather, he seems more interested in formalism, in playing with compositional devices, than naturalism. The paintings, which showed midtown intersections, for the most part, look as though he captured each scene from a distance with a wide-angle lens. Cars, buildings, and people, painted in meticulous detail, seem farther away than they should, and vistas more expansive. In "Fifty-Seventh Street and Fifth Avenue Looking South" (2004), for instance, the intersection and crosswalk are impossibly broad.
Neffson sees the geometry of the city foremost—the parallel lines of the architecture, the grids of the streets and windows, the angular shadows the sun casts between skyscrapers. Even "Columbus Circle & 60th Street" (2001), depicting the chaotic roundabout, is a study in spaciousness and order, with crosswalk lines guiding the eye. One of Neffson’s fortes is sorting out messy networks of objects, shadows, and reflections in store windows, which he does by systematically breaking down each component into a series of perfect planes."
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Walter Robinson- ARTNET Apri. 2001
Stephen Doherty- AMERICAN ARTIST Feb.1986
Robert Neffson- AMERICAN ARTIST Dec. 1987
Editor- GALLERY GUIDE May 1990 cover painting
Eva Jacobs "Candid Painting" DE CORDOVA MUSEUM, Lincoln, MA. 1975
Presenting painting to Larry Silverstein at ceremony celebrating new 7 World Trade Center, attended by Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki. Oct. 2004
Robert Neffson "Clive Head-New Paintings"
MARLBOROUGH FINE ARTS Ltd, London UK, Sept. 2007
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Around the Town, January 2008
"Les Ponts De Paris"
THE NEW YORKER, The Mail, February 2008
MERCEDES MAGAZINE, Art and Culture, September 2008
"Robert Neffson, Master of detail"
EXACTITUDE : HYPERREALIST ART TODAY, April 2009
John Russell Taylor