Feoli Fine Art - Michel Alexis

Michel Alexis

Michel Alexis (American born, living in New York and Paris, France)

Michel Alexis is a New York-based painter with a penchant for lyrical abstraction. His oil-and-mixed-medium paintings are full of delicate surprises that, on second viewing, are more assertive than the viewer might have originally thought. His gently curving, thin lines hold the viewer’s attention with their sensuality, and his squares and rectangles of color build up compositions notable for their balance and integrity. Alexis’s process communicates his pleasure in a more or less musical arrangement of elements—color and line are assembled with a subtle awareness of the differences of their effects that makes them nearly readable, much as one might read the music for a string quartet. The effects are often symbolic in nature, communicating a dense complexity.

Alexis begins by painting a background color and then mounting thin sheets of handmade paper on the canvas. His considerable investment in drawing gives the individual works their aura of subtle poetry, often enhanced by curving incisions, arabesques that spiral out and across the compositional field. In Epigram #32 (2003), a central yellow passage, flanked by squares and rectangles of darker colors, has a curving stripe on it, along with thin lines that activate the larger space.

"The basic structure of my paintings is derived from a childhood ritual. Alone, lying down, I would stare for a long time at my bedroom ceiling, a blank square ornamented by a frieze. There, I would effortlessly reconcile the minimalist and Baroque elements of the décor and combine them into imaginary, enigmatic shapes, suspended between the lure of the void and the exuberant profusion of life."

Michel Alexis was born in Paris, graduated with a degree in Economics, and then moved to a secluded hamlet in the Alps where he lived for eight years. During this time he was also traveling extensively around the world.

It was while he was converting a barn into a studio that he started modeling slabs of plaster which he inscribed with imaginary signs. He drew his inspiration for this work from both indecipherable glyphs of early civilizations whose ruins he had visited and works of disabled outsider artists which he had seen at the Musee de l’Art Brut in Lausanne.

For Alexis the glyphs and the creations of outsider artists had a similar effect, conveying a compelling beauty but also a mysterious quality that defied interpretation.

He subsequently moved to the United States to join his family and embarked on a new phase of his career, replicating on large canvases the kind of art he was doing with slabs of plaster, using heavy acrylic paste. In 1991 he moved to New York where he attracted favorable critical notice for a series of shows beginning with one based on a text by Gertrude Stein (New York Times, Aug.1995), followed by Alphabets (Artnews, 2002), Subtracted Word (Art in America, 2004), and Epigrams (2006) at the Stephen Haller Gallery in New York.

His recent solo shows also include Stolen Diaries (2006, Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris), Syllabary (2008, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica) and Brooklyn Epigrams (2009, Heriard-Cimino Gallery, New-Orleans).

Alexis’ work is exhibited in numerous museums as well as in public and private collections worldwide.

Source: Jonathan Goodman; Stephen Haller Gallery; Slash-Paris

RECENT SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2008

Syllabary

Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2006

Epigrams

Stephen Haller Gallery, New York, NY (catalogue)

Stolen Diaries

Galerie Isabelle Gounod, Paris, France

New Paintings, Ruth Bachofner Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2005 Synesthesia