ADAM ALESSI

Adam Alessi’s works are displaced in time and place, drawing inspiration from a fin de siècle Venn overlap of late Victorian, Aestheticism, and early Modernist ideas - without being explicitly tied to any past modality - they also feel fully present in today’s world of endless visual stimulation; where imagery from every era, historical or synthesized, all coexist alongside one another, in a contextual vacuum.

Over the last several years, Alessi has spent extended amounts of time in Japan. Much of the work for this exhibition was made, in part or in whole, during his time there working in an ad hoc attic studio in remote Iga, an environment promoting a sense of isolation not easily accessed in the artist’s primary studios in New York (and Los Angeles before that). The isolation has allowed for a quiet and meditative practice, illuminating an alternative creative artery; away from the frenetic energy of the major artistic capitals in which the artist primarily resides.

For this exhibition, Alessi has created a body of work rendered almost exclusively in a high-contrast sepia toned palette, calling on a familiar cast of characters set in cinematic, historical, or surreal scenes. In one large format work on paper, the famous french mime Marcel Marceau appears mid stage-fall through the central cavity of the stairwell in the legendary former Leo Castelli Gallery building in New York City. In others, fictional characters, at times jarring, inhabit the intimate near ground of each composition, as if suddenly, jarringly entering into one’s field of vision of an otherwise benign street scene.

Adam Alessi (b. 1994) lives and works in New York City. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions in galleries across the US and Europe. This is his first exhibition in Asia and first with Nonaka Hill.