In a cultural climate saturated with generative tools, algorithmic curation, and mediated identity, the work of Mark Alexander can be read not merely as a reflection of these dynamics but as an eerie prefiguration of them. His practice, spanning from stark portraiture to darkened appropriations of canonical masterpieces, shows a consistent interest in the instability of meaning and the mutability of form. These interests have only grown more urgent in a world where images can shift shape before our eyes, truth is endlessly deferred, and artificial intelligence has begun to inhabit the very processes by which we produce and interpret art.
What distinguishes Alexander in this context is not simply that he anticipated certain visual or thematic tropes now common in contemporary art, but that his method itself—slow, recursive, alchemical—seems to operate at a level one could describe as proto-algorithmic. That is to say, he does not merely use images; he rewrites their code. In works like Love Between the Atoms 2015 , perhaps his most overt meta-commentary, Alexander approaches the atomic structure of image and idea alike, interrogating what lies beneath the surfaces we inherit. Here, the suggestion is not just that meaning is layered, but that those layers can be reprogrammed.
This orientation is evident much earlier in his career. The Blacker Gachet 2005 series, a suite of thirteen near-black variations on Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr Gachet, was not simply an act of homage or critique. It was a serial, almost computational, dissection of an image to see what survived when its chromatic life was drained. What remained, Alexander discovered, was not absence but essence. Emotional signal persisted in the degraded copy. In this he stumbled onto something close to what AI now explores: how much of an image must be retained for meaning to persist? Where is the line between variation and erasure?
That same question animates Via Negativa 2008 , his cycle of sunflowers rendered in ash-tones. Again, the logic is not one of reproduction but of reduction—as if by removing colour, by repeating forms, by muting gesture, he could coax out some deeper truth. These works anticipate the rise of machine vision not in style but in spirit. Where AI is now taught to dream through millions of images, Alexander was painstakingly repainting one, again and again, with the suspicion that meaning might reside in the act of recursion itself.
His later works make this alignment even clearer. Ground and Unground 2012 , with its themes of toiling and myth, invokes the metaphysical writings of Jakob Böhme, who posited the existence of an "unground" — a nothingness from which all form emerges. In naming the series thus, Alexander offers a cosmological model for image-making that sits uncannily alongside today's generative systems. The Bog, a recurring symbol in this phase, becomes a literal substrate—a dark data field—where relics of history, religion, and culture are stored, decomposed, and reconstituted.
American Bog 2013 brings this to a head. Lincoln, JFK, Mickey Mouse, and the Freakes appear not as icons but as half-preserved residues. These aren’t pop art rehashes. They are post-apocalyptic archives. The American flag, repeated and bogged in oil, takes on the texture of forensic evidence. These works speak to a future where cultural memory is clouded, its figures softened by repetition and decay. They resemble not so much paintings as ghost files—lost JPEGs recovered from a corrupt drive. And again, we see Alexander engaging not just with the past but with the protocols of memory itself. The bog is a medium and a metaphor. It is storage and interface.
There is also his 2009 sculptural project Shield 2008 , in which enormous corten steel rings, evoking both Minoan shields and booster bearings, were placed alongside paintings. These "shields" were modeled on aerospace components Alexander once encountered during his engineering days. But they read now like processor halos—silent, rusted circuits orbiting his painted data. That Alexander constructed these objects to gain distance from an overworked image speaks again to a sensitivity to system fatigue. The tech world would call it latency. Alexander called it exhaustion.
Titles such as All Watched Over by Machines of Infinite Loving Grace 2011 , borrowed from Richard Brautigan and later echoed in Adam Curtis's documentaries, position Alexander in direct conversation with the techno-romantic mythologies of our time. The painting itself, drawing on Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, overlays this medieval vision with the anxiety of contemporary systems. The figures, once eternally young, are subtly aged. The dream of harmony with machines becomes something closer to haunted coexistence. The shift from Brautigan’s hippie cybernetic meadow to Alexander’s ash-hued dystopia marks a tonal collapse that many feel in our algorithmic present.
And yet, what makes Alexander so difficult to place is that he does not preach or declare. His tone is not prophetic but curious, even anxious. He has said that he paints to crush himself, to see what remains when he has pushed the image to its limit. This is not the techno-utopianism of early digital art, nor the critique-driven polemic of institutional theory. It is something more embodied and melancholic: a painter confronting the loss of certainty in both self and image. In this way, he differs from other painters of the post-Richter generation like Luc Tuymans or Wilhelm Sasnal, whose bleached aesthetics often feel more formally motivated. Alexander's grey is different. His entropy has an existential weight.
What then can we say of his method? It is iterative. It is suspicious. It is archivally haunted. But it is also one that seems to recognise, before it was widely apparent, that we were entering an age of visual collapse—where images reproduce themselves to death, and originality becomes less about invention than curation, recombination, and refusal.
This is not to say that Alexander is a digital artist. He works slowly, in oil and silence. But his sensibility is unmistakably digital in the deepest sense: not because he uses technology, but because his whole approach mirrors what AI now does. He loops, degrades, mirrors, muddies, bogs. He looks for what happens to meaning when it is strained through filters. He paints not symbols but symptoms.
There is, finally, the sense that he has always worked from the future backward—not in the style of a visionary, but like a man who has seen too far ahead and returned to warn us in whispers. If some artists begin with a vision and move outward, Alexander begins with an echo and moves inward. Not because he believes he is great, but because he suspects that only in the echo can we still hear the thing we’ve lost.
In the end, what he offers is neither optimism nor despair. It is something closer to a methodology for survival. A way of painting that, in its recursive intelligence and its willingness to confront erasure, shows us how to live with and through the machines we’ve made.
David Allan, May 2025