These new paintings extend the world of The Immortal Mortals series, restaging its cast of figures in luminous, imagined spaces. Historically, painters have worked from studio maquettes to build their fictions — here Alexander does the same — but what unfolds here is not historical, but more theatrical. It’s quieter. The set has changed. The darkness has gone.
What remains are colour fields — layered blues and greenish tints that echo sky, leaf, light. The figures, still in their familiar sculptural breastplates, no longer appear stranded or embattled. Instead, they observe. They stand beside ghost animals. They look into light. One holds a flower. There is stillness here, but not inertia — a kind of resting alertness.
The title plays on William Morris’s News from Nowhere, a vision of a post-industrial utopia free from mechanised drudgery. But nowhere has a second resonance now — the placeless realm of generated content and AI simulations. Increasingly, we inhabit a virtual “nowhere”: an ambient, unlocated time-stream. In such a world, being and nothingness feels less like philosophy and more like a condition.
These paintings don’t reject that future — but they do offer something inside it: care, form, presence. A raised hand. A grazing shadow. A resting stone. This might be where we end up — not in utopia, but in a livable fiction. And maybe that’s enough.