Exhibition Text
By
Andrew Woolbright
Of Brooklyn Rail
Casa Del Popolo is pleased to present five paintings by the artist Michael Alexander Campbell, his first solo exhibition in New York City.
There is a sense of refrain within Michael Campbell’s paintings. Rather than aligning with pure representation or abstraction or committing to a repeating style, they choose instead to tap the hidden vein that runs somewhere beneath narrative and hermetic interpretation. Campbell’s paintings resist their own immanence; working through virtuosic drips, stains, and ruptures that he then holds together with confident bravura and lyrical gesture. The brush of the artist responds to the events in the painting that are beyond the artist’s control; the artist’s hand collaborates with the chaos of what is already there.
They are aporia, not episteme. Whether they start with an image or they begin with material process, Campbell’s paintings work their way towards their antithesis, generating a kind of image-gnosis out of the artist’s sense of refrain. Its shape is the ouroboros of pictures and images, the same shape formed by Michael and Lucifer tumbling out of heaven in Lotto’s painting of them. In this reality, the space between abstraction and the image is somehow both infinite and intimate. Campbell holds the fraught history of painting and images in close proximity. Rather than defending the virtue of their position, the saint and the apostate trade positions. The dragon of Saint George, the persecuted and the persecutor, the damsel and the heroine, are all holding hands and ringed like Matisse’s dancers, slackening their forms with their increasing speed. Mimesis collapses into eroding oil skins. The distinction between the purity of depiction and the crude heresy of the hand is blurred until it is lost.
Michael Alexander Campbell
(b. 1999, United Kingdom) is an artist raised in Switzerland who now lives and works in New York as a protégé of renowned artist Julian Schnabel. A mentorship with serendipitous origins among the swiss alps in 2021. In his most recent works, Campbell used wax, oil paint, and traditional techniques such as glazing and impasto painting, he exposes his canvases to the elements. These weathered elements coexist with precise, traditional brushwork unbesmirched by weather, resulting in paintings that are at once raw and refined.