“The goals of modernist abstraction were ultimately to delete any illusionary space or reference to figuration. I am creating the allusion of deep recessive space and contrasting it against the use of actual three-dimensional paint - I use the real to create the imaginary.”

Frazer’s works assert a theatre of space and perception, while also attaining a physical, sculptural presence.

Each painting has a restricted palette that establishes a fundamental sense of the real world. Frazer’s mastery of expression and composition is deeply informed by the pictorial conventions of traditional landscape painting.

The physicality of Frazer’s works is as profound as the emotional language of his colours. Because of this, there is no single viewing point for any of his works – for example Evolution in its Turner-esque use of light has a tactile sensation of folded depths, too, when viewed close.

The emotional language of colour – what it says, how it makes us feel, why it is being used – is no simple nor easily understood thing. It requires the viewer to become involved. Frazer modulates the tones of his paintings and articulates the surface of his work in complex layering made meaningful and expressive by varying methods of application, such as using palette knives, tree branches, use of extrusion guns etc.

The surfaces then are sophisticated stories in themselves and so what may begin as an emotional journey and experience becomes both ‘about’ and ‘of’ something. Stand close to a Neil Frazer painting and inevitably there arises the sensation of being in the real world. Virtue & Vice is like a glacier of a world frozen in time. Evolution is about being in the bush or forest. The smell of this place, the feeling of growth is utterly pervasive. Yet on top of this Frazer’s use of gold adds a luxurious spatial flat quality and so the painting reveals a foreground that covers almost all its pictorial surface.