by Kelly Jean Egan
Alex Kanevsky’s new exhibition, Field Trip, at Dolby Chadwick Gallery opens with the kind of ease that comes when an artist is no longer maneuvering for position. Kanevsky has made clear, in various ways, that the real goal now is to paint every day and keep his life arranged around that possibility. The work reflects that shift. It feels unguarded, almost blunt in parts, and uninterested in delivering a tidy narrative of progress. What’s here is a painter following the logic of his own seeing, and letting the exhibition take whatever shape that produces.
The show is broader than expected. Landscapes, interiors, and figures move in and out of view without any one category becoming dominant. Some of the familiar sites return — a bed, a boat, a mirrored fragment — but they don’t feel recycled. They feel re-encountered. The atmosphere across these works is noticeably less uniform; the temperature changes from one painting to the next. At first, the range reads as casual, almost offhand. But the longer you stay with it, the more deliberate it becomes. Kanevsky isn’t widening the frame for novelty’s sake; he’s widening it because his attention is moving.
Model with Mirror and Mughal Tapestry, 2025 | Oil on wood | 48 x 48 inches
What stands out across the works is how decisively Kanevsky lets each painting establish its own logic. The pieces do not seem to revolve around a single thesis; instead, they sharpen different aspects of his practice, whether that is color, structure, pressure, or the pace at which an image is allowed to form. This distribution gives the exhibition an internal elasticity. Each painting feels self-contained, and the shifts between them register as part of the broader recalibration taking place in the work overall.
People in Red Interior makes that shift explicit. The red is immediate and almost confrontational, pulling the scene apart before the figures even settle. The bodies drift, but the room does too, and that mutual instability creates a kind of internal pressure. Planes jump forward; others recede or break. There’s no single point of resolution. Instead, the painting feels like an image trying to assemble itself in time, and refusing to force the issue. Kanevsky lets the painting reveal the thinking behind it, even when the thinking contradicts itself.
People in Red Interior, 2025 | Oil on wood | 60 x 32 inches
The contrast with Mt. Nephin is sharp. The landscape is restrained, almost plain at first glance, but the surface won’t behave. Small ruptures of scratched marks and lifted paint interrupt the calm. The composition holds, but with a faint tremor running through it. Kanevsky has painted landscapes before however, this one feels different: steadier in structure, shakier in its skin. The tension between those two states gives the painting more friction than its quiet tone initially suggests, leaving you calmly uncomfortable and continually looking.
Mt. Nephin, 2025 | Oil on mylar mounted on wood | 24 x 32 inches
For all these shifts, the show doesn’t abandon the sensibility that has defined Kanevsky’s work for years. The paintings still operate in that in-between zone where the image hasn’t fully committed to itself. Layers remain visible. Revisions accumulate. Clarity appears and then backs away. What changes here isn’t the foundation, but what gets built on top of it. The new works expand the perimeter; the core remains in place.
You can feel that continuity most clearly in Dark Corner. A figure hovers modestly on a bed, head turned away, limbs drawn in without theatricality. It’s a scene Kanevsky has approached often, but it doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels like a problem he keeps returning to because it keeps shifting on him. The red garment pulls the body toward abstraction, while the surrounding space refuses to precisely declare itself. Edges soften, colors drift, and the image hangs in a moment that doesn’t quite land. It’s one of the works that reminds you how much Kanevsky relies on delay. Not withholding information, exactly, but letting form arrive slowly, if at all.
Dark Corner, 2025 | Oil on wood | 18 x 18 inches
Swimmer complicates things further. A single figure stands upright, back turned, the outline merging with the gestures that surround it. The title promises motion, but the painting holds the figure in suspension. Patterns and marks gather without forming a coherent environment, and the body becomes a kind of hinge between representation and interference; a large stone in a meandering stream. Kanevsky pushes the figure toward dissolution but pulls back before the image slips away entirely. It’s not a departure from his earlier work, but an extension — the same instability, pushed into a slightly different register.
Swimmer, 2025 | Oil on wood | 42x 34 inches
What becomes clearer, the longer you sit with the exhibition, is how confidently Kanevsky handles shifts in scale, temperature, and pace without drawing attention to the adjustments themselves. Some painters telegraph their ambition; he does not. The work moves between intimacy and distance almost offhandedly, and the transitions are so unforced they risk being overlooked. That ease is part of the strength here. Even the more volatile pieces hold an internal steadiness, as if the paintings were calibrated from the inside out rather than assembled through external decisions. The show asks for time, and it earns it, not through spectacle, but through a quiet rigor that accumulates slowly and without announcement.
Taken together, the works in Field Trip make it clear that Kanevsky isn’t interested in guiding a painting toward resolution. He allows each one to remain unsettled, letting it shift between expansion, interruption, and reduction without forcing coherence. This isn’t a new direction so much as a clearer articulation of the one he’s been on all along. The paintings feel less concerned with proving anything and more intent on protecting the conditions that allow them to exist. At a moment when certainty is often mistaken for conviction, Kanevsky’s refusal to resolve reads as its own kind of precision. The images stay open, and the exhibition leaves you with the sense that their incompleteness isn’t a gap to be filled, but the exact territory where the work is most alive.
Field Trip, 2025 | Oil on wood | 60 x 42 inches
Taken together, the works in Field Trip make it clear that Kanevsky isn’t interested in guiding a painting toward resolution. He allows each one to remain unsettled, letting it shift between expansion, interruption, and reduction without forcing coherence. This isn’t a new direction so much as a clearer articulation of the one he’s been on all along. The paintings feel less concerned with proving anything and more intent on protecting the conditions that allow them to exist. At a moment when certainty is often mistaken for conviction, Kanevsky’s refusal to resolve reads as its own kind of precision. The images stay open, and the exhibition leaves you with the sense that their incompleteness isn’t a gap to be filled, but the exact territory where the work is most alive.