2015 Catalogue Archive

In Portrait of Joey Painting, LA-based Alex Becerra brings his fresh take to the artistic trope of portraiture through his chunky, chaotic paint application. Becerra attacks certain areas of the canvas with an obsessive fervor (the face and clothing) and leaves others as loosely sketched voids (the back of canvas and tabletop). As the eye moves around the canvas, Becerra’s contradictory styles and textures – from expressionistic to cartoonish – all add up to generate a work that revels in the physical qualities of oil paint. Not simply an exploration of material and process, the work also has a playful, conceptual edge as a painting of someone caught in the act of painting.