PARIS.- From 26th May until 18th June, Triple V gallery is presenting the work of American artist Alex Brown for the first time in Paris with the exhibition Internal Empire.

Born in 1966 in Des Moines, Iowa, Alex Brown is a painter and designer. A follower of figurative painting, bordering on abstraction, his meticulous compositions refer to Optical Art and Pop Art.

The subjects of Alex Brown’s paintings are found in the press or on the internet. He subsequently decomposes them by applying imaginary frameworks or exaggerated pixilation, then once re-focusing the image within a virtual composition it is realised in the most classic of media, oil paint.

Alex Brown’s work has been exhibited, most notably at the MoMA PS1. It has also been shown at the galleries Feature Inc. (New York), Blondeau F.A.S. (Geneva) and Minmin (Tokyo). His work is included in several public collections in the US and across Europe and in 2000 he was awarded the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award.

ALEX BROWN AND THE DIGITAL IMAGES PRODUCTION BY VINCENT PÉCOIL
Alex Brown’s paintings update the great tradition of landscapes and portraits, nudes, seascapes, interiors and still lifes. He works from found photographs—generally quiet and lacking in any obvious emotional impact—taken from postcards, travel brochures, press cuttings, and the Internet, and his initial attraction to an image often has to do with some small area of color.

In paintings from the mid-’90s, Brown imposed a series of transformations on this material, turning to computer graphics programs in his preparatory work to break the images up into pixels. These pixels, which both defined and abstracted the original picture, evolved over time from squares to overlapping circles and interlocking tile patterns, finally breaking free of the Op-art-like grid entirely to become free form shapes.

These recent paintings also function as modern equivalents to the anamorphoses—unrecognizably distorted images—hidden the paintings of early masters. Although Brown returns from time to time to the pixilation of his earlier work, the patterns in the paintings here are more often intuitive than geometric. The images that appear out of their disorganized forms are more like apparitions than appearances—phantasmagoria emerging from the surface of the painting. In this way, Brown’s work maintains its link with photography: The image is revealed slowly, as in the developing of a photographic print. Here, however, it is often the titles that play the part of the developer, providing a key to unpacking the images.

Brown deliberately distances himself from his sources. Working from pre-existing images—pictures that are “already out” as Richard Prince once said—is a way for Brown to leave the largest possible part of himself outside the painting. This distancing is accentuated by Brown’s working method: Diorama, a pixilated image that refers back to earlier paintings, is a blown-out, low-resolution digital file pulled off the Web, and the title suggests that the landscape depicted might itself be only an approximation of reality.

Brown’s paintings never completely divulge their secrets the first time we see them. The subject only comes into focus as the viewer moves away; as one approaches the painting, it disappears. In those works where one image nearly supplants another, the painting becomes almost abstract. In all of Brown’s work, the subject always seems more or less camouflaged. Perhaps he is expressing a distrust of an image’s ability to tell the whole truth, or an interest in an image’s ability to tell more than one truth. --Text by Vincent Pécoil for the exhibition catalogue Blondeau Fine Art Services, Geneva, 2005.