A faceless man whispers into a woman’s ear. Her face looks stricken, though the viewer will never know what she heard. Beholding this is like waking from a nightmare: You might not remember the dream, but you still feel the residue of dread hovering over your body.
Adam Alessi based Cruiser’s Creek, 2022—the titular artwork in a solo show at Clearing’s Brussels location last year—on a still from a 1985 music video of the same name by English post-punk band the Fall. The composition mirrors the frame, but the woman’s face was Alessi’s fabrication.
The artist will often rework a face in his paintings until “it feels like it’s paying attention to you, it’s judging you.” These prying likenesses synthesize an almanac of references, from horror films to illuminated manuscripts to memories of his Los Angeles childhood.
Almost all of Alessi’s countenances sneer, leer, or grimace—creating the claustrophobic feeling of being watched. If affect theory and informational surveillance networks are the two dominant epistemes of our moment, the artist traffics in both.
While the 29-year-old’s paintings resemble older traditions, like the works of Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley, the anxiety they provoke speaks to today’s conditions, where total scrutiny of civilian life has created an age steeped in self-consciousness. Alessi aims to trigger a feeling of “inescapable embarrassment,” not sexual so much as perverse.
When he was growing up in Los Angeles, he couldn’t look at stacks of folded clothes, because he would see faces in the creases. Eerie visages, dumbstruck and skewed, populated his first solo show at Smart Objects in LA in 2020. He has since included grids and landscapes in two recent solo shows for Clearing—first in Brussels, then in New York this summer—displaying his signature palette of lilac, burnt umber, and moss.
In his Los Angeles studio, Alessi is tinkering with surreal ceramic cups, funky descendants of Meret Oppenheim’s fur-covered table setting. He’s also embarked on a series of grid paintings—patches of moody ochres, stone gray—that evoke the same sinister feeling of his goblins, but abstracted.
He’s noticed that after an intense period of painting, he sleeps more deeply. The comedown of what he describes as an “anxiety-based practice” affords him, and by association the viewer, a kind of purge. The work, though, remains—continually bearing witness to these suspended moments of horror, the sense “that at any moment, a balloon behind my head is about to pop.”
For more about CULTURED's 2023 Young Artists, read our features with Alex Tatarsky, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Oscar yi Hou.
