The figure at the painting’s centre is not simply poised — she is posed, suspended in a posture that echoes both devotional iconography and institutional display. One arm extends outward, rigid, angled — Christlike in its orthodoxy, mannequin-like in its remove. What we are offered is not an emotive gesture, but a citation of one: the relic of an expressive vocabulary that has been emptied and re-staged.
Opposite her, the elephant is diagrammatic — a ghost of representation, neither creature nor symbol, but schema. And between them, absurdly delicate, a dandelion: a thing so overdetermined in its poetic charge that its survival here can only be read as irony, or as the residue of a belief system that no longer holds.
Alexander’s Views from Nowhere trades in precisely this ambiguity — images that seem to promise meaning, while quietly unmooring it. What’s spiritual is aestheticised. What’s alive is stilled. What’s felt is quoted.
The painting does not offer a scene to be believed. It stages the mechanics of belief itself — as form, as trace, as repetition.
