Steven Alexander: Chroma Consciousness

STEVEN ALEXANDER: CHROMA CONSCIOUSNESS

...chroma and consciousness -- mysterious essences that animate reality, and are defined by perception.

Steven Alexander is a builder of color-fields in which the viewer is the beneficiary of a quiet space to contemplate the relationship between them and the object before them. Extending the legacy of artists like Mondrian, Morandi, and Rothko who approached painting as an existential investigation, his paintings present uncomplicated color situations that mirror the viewer, and allude to rhythms, tensions and dualities of the body and the psyche. It is color that is the soul of this enterprise and through the richness and range of his palette, he recapitulates the history of art in a schematic, color-coded abstract distillation. These are not analytical paintings based on a pre-conceived system, but intuitively made as one color calls up another and is measured against another, balanced and counterweighted.

The Netherlands-based De Stijl movement embraced an abstract, pared-down aesthetic centered in basic visual elements such as geometric forms and primary colors. Partly a reaction against the decorative excesses of Art Deco, the reduced quality of De Stijl art was envisioned by its creators as a universal visual language appropriate to the modern era, a time of a new, spiritualized world order. Led by the painters Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian - its central and celebrated figures - the members envisioned nothing less than the ideal fusion of form and function, thereby making De Stijl in effect the ultimate style. In that vein, Steven’s work is characterized by rigorous attention to formal elements such as color, shape, balance, depth, composition, and scale.

Another chief influence on Steven is the much celebrated abstract expressionist  artist, Mark Rothko. One can easily see his influences in the brilliant luminosity Steven accomplishes through the application of thin layers of pigment, and juxtaposition of colors. Like Rothko, Steven’s art is distinguished by a rare degree of sustained concentration on pure pictorial properties such as color, surface, proportion, and scale, accompanied by the conviction that those elements could disclose the presence of a high philosophical truth. 

Steven was Born in 1953 in west Texas. He moved to New York in 1975, completing an MFA in painting at Columbia University, where he studied with Richard Pousette-Dart and Dore Ashton. 

This is the second solo exhibition of Steven's work at Spanierman Modern, however, his work has been widely exhibited and collected throughout the United States and abroad, including recent solo exhibitions at David Findlay Jr Gallery and The Curator Gallery in New York. A member of the venerable American Abstract Artists group, he has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Belin Foundation, studio residencies at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and Studio Art Centers International in Florence, and numerous public commissions. He maintains a home and studio in the hills of eastern Pennsylvania.