About
Biographical Note
David Alexanders is a visual artist working in a variety of media, focusing on the creation of contemplative works that derive their character and strength from the unique qualities of their execution. The paintings find cohesion in elegant threads of shifting light, dripping colour, and fine filaments of silver and gold. Rendered through a range of techniques and formats that offer a branded family of work, individual pieces are always faithful to a central concept of art as an invitation to and space for meditation.
All of the work is characterised by a powerful commitment to colour, which derives from the artist’s early work with diamonds and precious gemstones. Alexanders is a graduate gemmologist who has worked in the highest end of the luxury goods market as product designer for Montblanc and later as creative director of Fabergé. While he broke from the corporate world to devote himself to a vocation of creating art, this experience informs his commitment to offering artwork imbued with his passion for fine craftsmanship and the realisation of the extraordinary.
“David Alexanders’ paintings are extremely sensitive to the qualities of material, light and human perception. In his recent works, he has realised a unique concept of multi-layered images, combining a very elaborated use of the light and shadow effects of three-dimensional elements. The painted surfaces shimmer in complex structures. Depending on the light and the viewer’s position, these perfectly framed images glow as precious universes, incorporating beauty while leaving all gravity behind.”
- Angelika Stepken, Director Villa Romana, Florence
Paintings
The paintings Alexanders creates are built up through the systematic application of many layers of finely applied, regular brushstrokes of carefully calibrated colours. Executed on sizeable canvases, the art is meditative and spiritual in nature, calling forth an immersive experience. Facing a work of human-scale proportions, not only must viewers consciously decide how to look at and where to enter the painting, and how to navigate within it, but they may feel pulled along by the movement and the play of colour and light inherent in each creation. This level of engagement yields a complex, satisfying, and constantly changing visual and emotional experience leading the viewer into the stillness of meditation and silent contemplation.
Painted in set, timed blocks, these works are achieved through an extended, dedicated, and disciplined realisation. The artist's working method is a performative and structured process, in that Alexanders sets himself finite working periods for each application of colour and compiles records of times, dates, and hues of successive layers of his "colour veils," generating a set of unique coordinates for each work. These details inform the titles of the paintings and reflect the artist’s fascination with what can be achieved through the process of painting that cannot be replicated in any other medium, even in the age of digitisation and technical marvels.
“Infused with the artist's love of finely cut precious gemstones, David Alexanders's radiant new paintings express a lifetime of experience. Mature enough to have resolved questions of formal technique, Alexanders is supremely confident in his ability to manipulate colour and texture to create vibrant large-scale paintings that are steeped in the artist's devotion to light.”
- Dany Louise, independent commentator on the arts and cultural policy, London
Lightworks
In his Lightworks, Alexanders replicates the paintings in digital form, animating them with a fluid light that washes hypnotically across the lines of each work. Again, and on another level, the gaze of the viewer is drawn into a deeply engaging dance of light and colour while the mind drops into satisfying stillness.
"Alexanders’s works are entirely abstract but also have definite subjects. These subjects are the interaction of texture, colour, play of light and shifting spatial environments, but above all the paintings embody emotion. This is an artist who gives titles to his work, and the titles are informative. For example Fear into Power 2013 and UPW: Unleash the Power Within 2014. Each painting also carries its own production co-ordinates, through which Alexanders informs and shares the performative nature of their production.”
- Patrick Lucock, Co-Founder In The Moment, London
Photoworks
Using his camera like a paintbrush, Alexanders works with photography, creating very large-scale works that exploit the capture of colour, movement, and distortion, located on the very edges of abstraction. Maintaining the utmost quality of conception and execution, he also recreates extracts of the images with subtly lavish infusions of paints, precious elements, and gold. Current Photoworks concentrate on themes of architectural environment, emotive experience, and a sense of place within, despite, and beyond religiosity.
“The persistence of painting in a digital age is complex and absorbing. It continues because, as from the earliest times, it makes visible the previously invisible. Paintings are special manifestations of human creativity, and these quiet, majestic and gentle pieces by David Alexanders belong in that great tradition, offering an aesthetic and spiritual experience that is entirely in keeping with modern life.”
- Anastasia Petrovskaya & Maria Korolevskaya, Art Advisors, London and Moscow
Framed Works on paper
Alexanders produces editions of high-quality fine art prints that select and explore details from the large-scale paintings. Reproduction quality (in Germany) is superb: Hahnemühle, the finest fine art print paper in the world, plus the finest inks in Germany, render archival-quality prints with a lifespan of 200 years, which is extraordinary and rare. These framed pieces can be displayed solo or in groups and offer a richly satisfying experience at an alternative price level to the larger autographic works.
"David Alexanders’s works epitomize the essential function of art: to make real something that cannot exist in any other way. Alexanders’s background in diamonds and precious gemstones interestingly reflects the reverse of his process as an artist. The gemstone starts in its raw crystal form and the skill of the cutter reveals and enhances its beauty. Alexanders's paintings start from traditional base materials – pigment and canvas – and through a matrix-based procedure, combining time, colour and process, create visual phenomena that offer a unique and rewarding experience. Like the gemstones, they offer two distinct types of visual manifestation: the external and the internal. A gemstone has its external brilliance, colour and play of light, but it also offers a limitless internal environment composed from these elements. The paintings are the same. They can be appreciated as large, dynamic, vibrant colour-veil surfaces and they can also be explored as shifting, moving interior spatial experiences – requiring journeys of enquiry by the eye."
- Gabriele Ferraris, former Director Torinosette, La Stampa, Turin
Final Note
Alexanders’ work has been promoted by American Express, and he’s been featured on CNN and BBC Two. He lives and works in the Principality of Monaco.