STEVEN ALEXANDER STUDIO

Exerpts from essay in the World At Large exhibition catalogue:

COLOR, ACTUALLY

(...) Steven Alexander's variously scaled paintings consist of two tiers of colored vertical bands that change in width and are characterized by the classic simplicity of a (modernist) grid. The field itself is divided into quadrants although often the median horizontal demarcation prevails over the cruciform. Additionally, these quadrants reflect the proportions of the overall canvas. Alexander complicates things, however, by his sequences of colors, his architectonic structure a neutral, if taut and necessary scaffold for the dazzling interplay of color. It is color that is the soul of this enterprise and through the richness and range of his palette, he racapitulates the history of art in a schematic, color-coded abstract distillation.
(...)
But it is as perceptual experience and sensual objects that these paintings were conceived. The different widths of the color bands establish a syncopated rhythm across the surface as the opulent hues vibrate against each other in duets, trios and as an ensemble, each color causing a response that catalyzes a visual chain reaction.
(...)
Each band of color interacts with its adjacent bands, each quadrant with the others and then with the painting as a whole. It's an inductive method, building up toward a total image and then deconstructing the whole back into its constituent parts, each module resembling a musical note with its particular tone and timbre that is "played" by the eye, activated like a musical score. The tactile, lively surfaces...are perfectly calibrated as color and shape act together, a seductive combination of line and color, the astringent and the lush.
(...)
These are not analytical paintings based on a pre-conceived system but intuitively made as one color calls up another and is measured against another, balanced and counterweighted. (...) The titles, too, are points of reference for Alexander and conjure up a sense of place - Lhasa (2006), Soma (2006) - or the palette of another artist - After Bellini (2006) - without fixing the image, an open-endedness that is one of abstraction's great advantages.

Alexander is a gifted colorist engrossed by process and continues to believe in pure painting, certain that there is still immense gratification to be obtained by simply looking, when followed by seeing.

Lilly Wei