Alex Kanevsky
LAST DAYS BEFORE BRIGHT FUTURE
September 7-30, 2023
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 7, 5:30-7:30 PM
Dolby Chadwick Gallery is pleased to present Last Days Before Bright Future, an exhibition of spectacular new paintings by Alex Kanevsky. This exhibition coincides with the release of a monograph chronicling the past 23 years of Kanevsky’s work, available at the gallery or online.
Over the past two decades, Kanevsky has brought us numerous windows into the human figure. Whether lying on a bed, turning away, sharing a meal, or riding a horse, his models seem one with their surroundings. Ironically, it is through Kanevsky’s mode of blurring, blending, and refracting that they seem to be made whole. Interior and exterior are made mutable. Subject and environment exist in a shared space. Color and marks flow like air, light, and water to bind the animate with the inanimate.
Kanevsky’s paintings resound with a fluid, sensual energy. Bodies often appear suspended in space as they converge and intersect with their surroundings. Forms move through each other, as if all matter were malleable. In The Source , interiors pulsate as walls and floors bend and shift, patterns rippling and expanding outward as they blend with muted natural greens at the painting’s epicenter. The setting contorts and the figures enter a dream. The soft focus of their closed eyelids leads them to a world teeming with energy.
Garden of Earthly Delights and Disappointments, stands as a cornerstone of the exhibition. Landscape and figure are superimposed on one another, streaming green across pale skin and vice versa. Moments of intimacy populate a broad horizon as bodies are entwined, embracing, while other figures writhe, roll, and crawl away on hands and knees. The figures littered throughout the landscape seem unbothered by the threat of the abyss in the background. As the title alludes to an edenic origin of pleasure and punishment, so here do Kanevsky’s figures consume themselves in these “delights and disappointments.”
The language of Kanevsky’s paintings is wholly visual. By resisting the verbal, they resist systems of order and meaning that rely on naming and schematic structures. The works can instead be understood as offering views of the world that are unfiltered and unhampered by our preconceptions. What we grasp is rather visual data in a state of flux, mirroring the vibrations of our eye, which must constantly move, albeit imperceptibly, in order to reconstruct a scene.
In Kanevsky’s paintings, there is an intimacy of observation; he is honoring a distinctly human yearning for connection. A particular glimpse of this communion is offered in Winter Party in 2020. The painting is an icy blue scene of a table set in the snow, reminiscent of scarce and distant meetings with friends in the New Hampshire winter. It captures a moment in time when rare sips of human contact felt fragile and precious. The painting is melancholy and exuberant in equal turns. Kanevsky invites us into this crystal land. We fly toward its reflection. We raise a glass. It is solid. It is melting.
Kanevsky’s paintings diffuse and expand their enigmas with a strange liquid beauty. His is a world in which the sensual still holds a multitude of possibilities, and we are witnesses to the act of becoming.
Alex Kanevsky was born in 1963, in Rostov-na-Donu, Russia, and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he has also taught. He cites a range of influences, from Velásquez to Joseph Beuys, James Joyce to Cormac McCarthy, and Tarkovsky to Kaurismäki. His work has been included in exhibitions across North America and Europe and can be found in the Achenbach Collection at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, among other collections. Kanevsky is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Pew Fellowship for painting. Art in America, Harper’s Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Squarecylinder, among others, have featured his work. This will be his eleventh solo exhibition at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.