All Watched Over by Machines of Infinite Loving Grace

All Watched Over by Machines of Infinite Loving Grace, 2011
Oil on canvas
3 parts (central 110 x 100 cm, left 110 x 45.2 cm)

“The Notion of uncannily living works whose subjects mystically age over time, like Oscar Wilde’s portrait of Dorian Grey, is taken to at once dizzying and disquieting extremes… All Watched Over By Machines of Infinite Loving Grace. Here, the artist revivifies Bosch’s triptych from the turn of the sixteenth century, The Garden of Earthly Delights, by subtly geriatrifying figures in it, finely fatiguing not the surface of the work, but the supple complexions and fragile physiques of the characters that Bosch depicted in his Medieval masterpiece – as though the spiritual garden were a place, not of organic regrowth, but of infinite decomposition and demise….art mystically distends its existence beyond the ostensible limitation of time, Alexander prepares the soil for the discovery of a deeper space of greater aesthetic complexity still, one in which decay and regeneration are not sequential but synonymized, and become one and the same. ”

- Kelly Grovier, Mark Alexander/American Bog