Time, in the work of Mark Alexander, is neither a backdrop nor a subject, but the very medium in which the art is suspended. As if painting in sediment rather than oil, Alexander gives form to duration. Each work bears the tension between the instant and the infinite, between the arrest of an image and the centuries it seems to contain. This is an art not of depiction but of compression: a visual archaeology in which history is compacted into surface, presence, and silence.
His best-known interventions — the Red Mannheim series, The Blacker Gachet, and the spectral afterimages of the Freakes — are acts of temporal excavation. They do not merely represent older images, they displace them from their native time and rehouse them in a new register of remembrance. Alexander is not nostalgic. He does not recreate the past to console the present. Instead, he slows time until we are forced to sit with it, to feel its sediment settle upon the eye.
One might borrow from Walter Benjamin's notion of the "constellation" — a moment when the past flashes up in an image and arrests the flow of history. In Alexander's paintings, this flash is subdued, restrained, rendered with the hush of burnt umber and leaden black. But the effect is just as Benjaminian: an image lifted out of the continuum of time to expose its fissures.
There is a certain violence to this. Alexander's methods are exacting. He strips his sources of their context, their colour, their presumed vitality. What remains is a monument under erasure — a sacred echo or an elegy. In doing so, he asks not what an image once meant, but what it can mean now that it has endured. This is painting as revenant: it comes back altered.
Time also lives in the materiality of the work. The black resinous surfaces of The Blacker Gachet are not merely colour choices; they are deposits. They resist the eye. They accumulate light without reflecting it. They behave more like geology than pigment. In this sense, Alexander's paintings do not age — they are already aged, already in dialogue with entropy.
In The Elephant and the Dandelion, time is not monumental but intimate. The encounter between the girl and the beast is poised in suspension. The dandelion, itself a symbol of ephemerality, appears fossilised mid-breath. This is not a moment snatched from life, but one returned from oblivion. As in much of Alexander's work, time here is not moving forward — it is folding in on itself.
It would be tempting to describe Alexander as a painter of memory, but memory, in his hands, is not psychological. It is architectural. These are not recollections but reconstructions. His red altarpieces do not evoke remembrance through sentiment; they enact it through structure and scar. They do not so much invite reflection as demand it. To look at a Mark Alexander painting is to be placed in time, not merely reminded of it.
His practice is also a critique of acceleration. In an age of digital plenitude, where images flash and vanish in an instant, Alexander slows us down. His is a counter-temporal aesthetic. Each painting is a dam against the torrent — a place where vision lingers and time becomes viscous.
In this, there is an ethical dimension. To give time its due — to look slowly, to think historically — is to resist the cultural drift toward oblivion. Alexander's art is not merely about the past; it is an argument for duration, for persistence, for the right of things to remain.
And so we might say that Mark Alexander does not paint pictures. He paints the work of time itself. Not as a theme, but as a force — invisible, weighty, and inescapable. His paintings hold time still long enough for us to feel its gravity. They are not historical paintings. They are temporal objects.
They do not age. They are already aged. They do not mourn. They endure. They do not remember. They remain.
That is their power, and that is their challenge: to confront the viewer not with what has been, but with what insists on being.
David Allan, May 2025