Alex Kanevsky

About Alex Kanevsky

Layers of paint that rub out, then bloom again

Alex Kanevsky is a virtuoso painter born in Russia.

“Virtuoso painter Alex Kanevsky captures movement and time’s constant flow in canvases that resist adherence to a single moment, or even a single reading.”

Alex Kanevsky’s multilayered works combine abstraction and figuration in layered, painterly compositions in which he strives to convey his own personal and particular view of the world with extreme clarity, and this process produces compositions that shimmer with a kind of Futurist velocity while also capturing a serene feeling of stillness.

The figure is central to Alex Kanevsky’s work, and his figures inhabit mysterious landscapes and ambiguous architecture, often composed of wide swaths of color that contain echoes of color field painting, and he focuses on the nude, creating soft, tactile bodies in luscious flesh tones.

Alex Kanevsky describes himself as a slow painter who must nevertheless work quickly to maintain a fresh approach to the canvas, and his process of painting, rubbing out, and painting over was developed over many years, creating a kind of palimpsest in which past iterations and experimentations remain visible beneath the topmost layer of paint.

Alex Kanevsky paints both from life and from photographs, but he relishes most the kinetic energy of live models, often working with the same models for years at a time, developing a strong sense of their individual form and motion, and photography allows him to step back from his own perception of reality and discover alternate points of view, particularly enjoying the imperfections that sometimes crop up through the photographic process.

Alex Kanevsky feels a deep connection to art history, especially to the masters of portraiture Rembrandt and Velázquez, and the influence of post-war figural painters such as Lucian Michael Freud and Francis Bacon is immediately apparent in his moody, abstracted figures, while the roots of his color can be found in the work of Van Gogh, Seurat, and Richard Diebenkorn.

• Born in Russia, now based in the United States.
• His work combines abstraction and figuration in layered compositions.
• He is influenced by Rembrandt, Velázquez, and post-war figural painters.
• His process involves painting, rubbing out, and painting over.
• He works from both life and photographs, but prefers live models.

Alex Kanevsky admires the work of literary greats such as Tolstoy, James Joyce, and Wallace Stevens, and he finds an arresting beauty in the forms of Japanese pottery and the colors of Scandinavian cinema, and these manifold interests find their way into a body of work that is both compelling and mysterious.

Art Category Fact: Palimpsest is a term used in art to describe a work that has been painted over, with traces of the earlier image still visible, and it is often used to create a sense of depth, history, and the passage of time, and it has been used by artists such as Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, and Alex Kanevsky, who layer paint to create complex, multi-layered compositions that reveal the artist’s process and the evolution of the image.

“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.” Edgar Degas

Alex keeps a running record of his paintings on his own website, somepaintings.net, if you want to dig deeper into his work.