The Knot

Miguel Abreu Gallery is pleased to announce the opening, on Thursday, March 12, of The Knot, the third one-person exhibition by Alex Carver at the gallery. Across 12 paintings, Carver reaffirms his commitment to the use of frottage, monoprinting and deliberate brushwork as means to achieve complex surfaces and spatial conditions for painting. These varied techniques deliberately confound traditional dichotomies such as inside and outside or body and world. As a central motif, the knot appears both as a discrete visual icon and as a broader compositional and visual disposition towards the painted image. Carver plays with the inherent contradictions and connotations of the knot as both a material entanglement and as a pure conceptual object which both convolutes and binds, as much as it clarifies and tethers. To produce his works, the artist often begins by making a series of low-relief, frieze-like sculptures which he then places behind unstretched canvas attached to his studio wall. In doing so, Carver is able to make frottaged imagery with large plaster knives by moving oil paint over the surface of the canvas, leaving an indexical trace of the object embedded in oil. This process constitutes a provisional and painterly approach that can evoke more advanced imaging technologies such as scans, X-rays, and ultrasound without merely illustrating them. Following Carver's ongoing fixation with biomedical source material and the medieval body, the reliefs produced for this exhibition were inspired by early anatomical studies, a CT scan of a fallen climber as well as an icon from medical history, Wound Man. Throughout the show, these various impressions received by the canvas emerge from and recede back into an undulating membrane of visual information, which insists on the ecstatic and vibratory possibilities of painting. Here, figure and ground exist as coordinates in the pictorial field but are largely bypassed in pursuit of everything between them.