Alex Carver
Expanded Skin

Opening – 26 APR 2024, 6-9 pm

For his forthcoming solo exhibition for Gallery Weekend 2024, Expanded Skin, Alex Carver expounds upon his disciplinary and material conflation between painting and the body. The series cross examines the historical and contemporary industrialization of suffering, translating and mimicking the modus of archaic practices which lie between the disciplines of torture and medicine, allegorizing the treatment of the skin through the membrane of painting.

Borrowed imagery from the Divine Comedy Illustrated by early Renaissance miniaturist, Priamo della Quercia, is cut meticulously by hand in the manner of a skin graft mesh and then expanded and hinged with masking tape to be used as an observational model for painting. Frottage, brushwork and diagrammatic fragments from medical patents for skin grafting tools emerge and recede from the undulating surfaces.

ALEX CARVER’s kaleidoscopic paintings deal with architectures of pleasure and discipline.

Appropriated texts, fragmented information graphics, mediaeval woodcuts form a dense image ecology that develops in close relation to his film and video art. The paintings are populated with mesmerizing braille-like meshes, functioning sometimes as diagrams, spatial coordinates, or appearing like raised wounds over the surface of the skin. Carver’s application of techniques such as frottage produce dense, multilayered, and kaleidoscopic compositions, able to warp space and time.