Schoeni Art Gallery, Until Sat 18
 
Of the handful of street artists who are gallery players, Britain’s Adam Neate is, along with Banksy, part of the original generation that made this practice possible. Yet of the many ‘i’s of street art – irony, irreverence, illegality – Neate’s work has none. Striped T-shirt, from Nicole Schoeni’s private collection, serves as a guide for the 13 giclée prints, street art’s gallery manifestation. Despite the 2D medium, the prints have amazing dimensionality. Just one look at his portraits or figure studies is enough to justify his being dubbed the Picasso of the urban art movement. There are shades of cubism; his signature use of cardboard to graft out the structure of the subject’s face – with staples, barcodes and warnings still visible under the paint – brings Picasso’s Guitar to mind.

Sincerity reverbs throughout Neate’s work; his subject comes across as a man wrought with distress – alienated, lonely, homeless – portrayed with violent vulnerability. Yet there are days when he must have felt stronger, as shown by Red Self Portrait 2007.

The three introspective works are devoid of the hard angular lines that shape his other pieces with mask-like cardboard faces. In The Deepend, Neate beautifully dissolves into a blur of dark colours in unselfconscious contemplation, and into colourful, casual strokes in Tea Drinker. His portraits are affecting precisely because they are not irreverent or ironic, but emotional with abandon

It is, then, a relief to find feelings of companionship in Calm Fear – The Best Cuddle, a glimmer of hope hidden in one corner of the gallery. Two figures with cut out eyes and dark arms, still fearful, but locked in embrace. Neate’s work is a hopeful reality that – in the anonymous, unforgiving city – there are still those of us who feel.

Bourree Lam