neon primitivism

The colorful explosion of modern neon colors alongside her clay pigments and primitive forms in Beletic’s, Neon Primitivism is a natural extension of both Ali’s primitivist ideology and her commitment ‘bringing the party and the fun’. 

Ali Beletic’s Neon Primitivism extends her long-standing interrogation of ritual, revelry, and the primitivist gesture into a luminous field of conceptual experimentation. The series unfolds as an ecstatic convergence of the archaic and the self-aware, a reminder that painting, in Beletic’s studio, remains both a sensual technology and a conduit of ancestral memory. Her use of ultra-matte pigments, botanical dyes, and oils alongside spray paint and pieces of charred wood animates the material intelligence of early mark-making, while her compositional gestures recall the physical urgency of Abstract Expressionism.

Visually referenced in the series is an expansive understanding of mark-making as one of humanity’s varied and inventive acts. Across civilizations and disciplines, marks have operated as instruments of thought, expression, identification, and transmission, at once instinctive and extraordinarily sophisticated. Beletic engages this vast vocabulary through its distinct modes of meaning: the sign and signifier, the resemblance of the icon, the physical trace of the index, the coded intelligence of the glyph and ideogram, the cultural resonance of the symbol, and the accumulated familiarity of the motif. Emblems and archetypes invoke collective memory, while metaphor and allegory allow forms to extend beyond their immediate appearance. These modes of communication coexist without resolving into a singular system, moving between gesture and language, intuition and convention, the intensely personal and the collectively understood. Here, mark-making is not simply a means of representation but an extraordinary human technology for inventing, organizing, and communicating reality.

Through a language that oscillates between ceremony and spectacle, Beletic articulates a cosmology where gesture becomes transmission: an echo of cave wall tracings, a nod to the raw immediacy of the New York School, a shimmer of Pop’s radiant surface. The works vibrate with what Charles Olson once called the Archaic Postmodern, a simultaneity in which past and present collapse into a single sensorial continuum. In Neon Primitivism, Beletic stages this collapse not as nostalgia, but as a living dialogue between the elemental and the electric, the ancient body and the contemporary eye.

It was here that she derived the process of working with clays, dried plant materials, botanical dyes, and paints made of finely crushed rare minerals and gems, to explore glowing mattes and chalky earthy textures.  This follows in the tradition of her prior sculptural work (almost an artistic take on experimental archeology) which traces primitive technologies, and works with the experiential and the sensual - i.e. hand building mahogany and glass rain catchments, working with fire as a sculptural element, exploring artifact creation using primitive tools and techniques as a means to explore primitivism, lighting up a boulder strewn desert for invitees to walk through, and even building a surfboard from Tule reeds.

Her directness of emotion communicated through primal, rugged gestures, juxtaposed with an integration of ancient philosophies explores the thin line between symbolic forms, icons, signifiers, motifs, emblems, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figuration, gestural abstraction and a modern pop sensibility.  Her confident and rule shattering sensibility pulls on us to be 21st century rebels once again and to seek wildness, experience, humanity, and mythos.