In his incessant interweaving of life and art and with his stalwart inclination to invest material with power, all of Neal Beggs’s works, however diverse, are instilled with potency. Beggs is bent on relating the anthropological to the spiritual, tapping into the coding between nature and culture. Displayed here is a sign comprising of lights formed into letters spelling-out I POSSESS FLAMES (2009). Extracted in a purely abstract manner from a larger work of the same ilk that directly imparts the scripture from I Corinthians 13:1-3 entitled LONESOME IN THE DESERT (2009), the words in this piece, contrarily, do not comprise of a quote, thus the piece is immediately embedded with manifold meaning. In itself the expression has no precedent; rather, the first two words were positioned above the third word in the former work; it was only afterwards that this trio leapt from the panel and formed an entity in the artist’s mind, proceeding to stick like glue and very soon making perfect sense… Beggs thinks back to John Lennon, as to St. Paul, both of who were said to possess flames in the way of fire and energy. One can also, of course, reference the Pentecost, whence a tongue of fire came and settled on each person, allowing them to be guided by the Spirit and to speak in many languages. In fact, after replaying in the mind long enough, ‘I possess flames’, this newly compiled expression becomes akin to one of Lawrence Weiner’s statements or to the chorus in a pop song. When constructing the piece, Beggs set about composing it as if it were a landscape painting, choosing blue lights as ‘sky’ and red lights as ‘desert’, the cold and the warm. Indeed this subliminally created visually luminous one-liner reeks of rich interpretation of every sort and at every level.
Text by Jodie Hruby. Brussel 2008.
