Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
Michael Alfe, a young San Francisco painter, paints pompadoured youths who wander in perspectivally twisted interior-exterior spaces vomiting crystaline lines of jewel-like paint. He paints still lifes whose main element may be blazing lamp shaped like a football. He paints houses squatted in curved spaced landscapes in timeless day-nights with cigarette butts raining onto astro-turf lawns and cubist trees.
His surfaces shimmer with changes from gloss to matte, thick to thin, rough to smooth.
Painful, frightening, and sinister events are rendered elegantly with glistening or velvety paint. The painting here, Space Geishas, was done in collaboration with his wife, Dru Kim.
Michael Alfe and Dru Kim.
Dru Kim.
Michael Alfe.
Michael Alfe.
The basic conceit of Warm Equations is that a book can abstract the space of conversation typically delimited in front of paintings, that the thematics of a painter’s practice, in this case Alan Reid’s, can be constellated through a chorus of related texts.
“How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
A discussion of urbanism and Staten Island, cartography, and monumental sculpture’s place in modern society.
Originally published in
Georgia Marsh, Paul Bowles, Michael McClard, Olivier Mosset & Fred Brathwaite, and Duncan Hannah. Cover by Mary Heilmann.
Work that is just about the technical or conceptual, personal or political, is fine; it meets the world with what’s in fashion. But there’s something else bordering on magic, that brings an artwork home, makes it land and resonate. You can’t really teach that so much as conjure it.
Kara Walker
