Alex Sewell. HOOKEY

About

In his most recent works, Sewell plays hookey from death: Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones’ tombstones gather dust, while Cobain’s grave wears a Daniel Johnston “Hi, How are you” t-shirt, a nod to Sewell’s own passage across the zodiac threshold of Saturn Return.1 In the eponymous portrait, the painter considers the importance of “gracefully defacing” and continues his tongue in cheek critique of all things taken too seriously, crafting caricatures of our demons, our egos, and everything in between.

Sewell channels visual tropes from gaming lore and popular culture into oil on canvas and wood (his technique honed as an assistant to Jeff Koons) and plays psychological trompes l’oeil. Show me my opponent, a wooden Excalibur embedded in a clearly labeled ROCK lures our hero complex in. “Young boy comes across sacred object. Saves world through altruism and violence”, intones Sewell, mocking this trope. Hero complex and artist syndrome sound astoundingly alike: King

engraving

nor from their

Arthur’s retrieving of Excalibur not so distant from

Raphael and Michelangelo’s crawling into the grottos of Nero’s Domus Aurea,

of signatures into its frescos, and neither the least bit remote from Basquiat’s tagging

of New York City walls with his crowns.

In vivid liquid-crystal color, Sewell conflates human form, sports equipment, machines of war, urban legend and mythology. With a wink of humor, he dives deep into the subconscious, and forces a collision of beat ‘em up figures, sketched from the naïve understanding of youth and flattened across fore and backgrounds. Sewell’s landscape is splattered with the bodies of Krang and with Nintendo graphics; it’s a land where the absurd and the grotesque converge, and where the tools of boyhood and adolescence play within other worlds of play. Tangerine tank2 draws up the question of our instinct for violence as it co-exists with innocence - aggression imminent even in young children. Painted in second-person perspective, it is the viewer’s hands on the handlebars and our own bodies enclosed by a wooden console, tricked out with benign gauges and make-pretend devices for navigating imaginary terrain. From Superhands to Street Fight Man, Hookey teases our primal impulses, alternating between the need to play and the urge to battle, ultimately provoking the public to reflect on our own psycho-scape.