Painted with the icy precision of photorealism, Self Portrait 1 depicts a toddler in a high chair, mouth slightly smeared, caught mid-bite. The expression is unreadable — alert, detached, almost watchful. What appears at first glance to be sentimental is instead unsettling in its stillness. This is not a snapshot of innocence but a self-conscious staging of it.
Part of a series, the painting predates the smartphone era but feels eerily prescient: a time before the compulsive documentation of childhood became cultural reflex. Here, Alexander turns the lens on himself, but from a vantage point no child could possess — adult, distanced, and already archived.
The result is less a portrait than a reconstruction. A meditation on memory, image-making, and the eerie flatness of the documented self.
Self Portrait II is in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Centre, Paris
Exhibited: Pompidou Centre 2016.
