Mark Alexander’s life, like his paintings, seems to have been assembled in layers — with patience, pressure, and a strange, almost accidental logic. The outlines are now familiar: a difficult child from rural Gloucestershire; a teenager apprenticed to a silversmith who cleaned silver with cyanide; a self-styled engineer and factory supervisor who would later find himself teaching English to the Italian police; a man who painted a copy of David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps to talk his way into the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford. What emerges from all this, however, is not a tale of transformation or personal triumph. Alexander has never tried to be a symbol of upward mobility or creative genius. He is something else altogether: an artist who seems to paint as if for a time beyond his own.
This is not to say he disavows the present — only that he doesn’t flatter it. Where much contemporary art is fast, fluent, and reflexively ironic, Alexander’s is deliberate, dissonant, and unusually sincere. His works often begin with images inherited from art history, Christian iconography, pop culture, or political mythology, and render them again in thick oils, obscure hues, or near-total darkness. What they offer is not nostalgia, nor critique, but a kind of stillness — a waiting. As Alexander put it himself: “I think the bog is now a medium through which I can search for the uncanny residue of what’s on my mind.”
The bog, both as a literal subject and as a metaphor, has become central to his practice. In paintings such as those from his Bog and American Bog series, history is not treated as background or commentary but as matter — physical, decaying, unearthed. The images are often of iconic figures (Lincoln, JFK, the Freakes, Mickey Mouse), but they appear softened, tarnished, submerged. These are not relics of a lost golden age, but symbols caught in the slow drag of entropy. The flags, too, are painted not with patriotic fervour but with oil-heavy reverence, as if time itself had pooled in the stripes. The technique is thick, almost sculptural, pushing paint to the edge of legibility. Whatever clarity once belonged to the source material is now buried, not erased but made indistinct — an echo rendered visible.
Alexander’s early works, including the quietly arresting Jasmine (1997–98), already carried this undertone. There is devotion there — not just to the sitter, but to the act of making. He paints as if to understand. His blackened Dr Gachet series and his grey Via Negativa sunflowers are not reinterpretations but engagements, an artist using repetition and reduction to get closer to what resists articulation. In the double portraits The Garden Boy and The Blind Garden Boy, the repetition itself becomes meaningful: not a technical variation, but a metaphysical one, testing the limits of perception.
The Shields, monumental Corten steel sculptures shown in Berlin, mark a formal departure but not a conceptual one. Here too is the desire to step back, to seal something off, to slow the encounter. Derived from aerospace components — LVA rings that allow the separation of rocket stages — they suggest that Alexander’s art is not only about holding time but marking thresholds. These shields, like many of his works, feel less like declarations than like interruptions.
He has said he does not set out to persuade. “I’m not sure I want to know what people see in me,” he once told an interviewer, “for fear I’ll become like the millipede who, when asked how he walked with so many legs, thought about it — and never walked again.” This reluctance to define himself, or even to understand himself too clearly, might be what protects his work from becoming polemical. Despite its religious and political imagery, Alexander’s art doesn’t seek to convince. It asks us to look. And to keep looking.
Some artists strive to be of their time. Alexander, though shaped by it, doesn’t strive in that direction. He paints with the unhurried conviction of someone who believes that if a work is to matter, it will matter later. This isn’t about prophecy, or prestige. It’s about pace. In a world that rewards immediacy, he works slowly. In a culture of explanation, he paints ambiguities. If there is a trace of clairvoyance in his art, it lies not in what it predicts, but in the way it is built to outlast the moment.
Mark Alexander is not positioning himself as a master or outlier. He is simply making paintings he believes might still be seen — really seen — when much else has faded. There is no manifesto here, no self-mythology. Just work. Work that waits.
David Allan, May 2025