Dean Kissick on Alex Carver

ALEX CARVER’S RECENT BODY OF WORK, made over the past few years, fixates on the torture of human bodies. His painted figures are always suffering or else inflicting suffering on others, and he appears to revel in these depictions of violence, making them luscious, dreamlike, and seductive by rendering them in lurid Technicolor and by performing acts of violence himself: abstracting the image, obscuring it with distortion and noise, dissolving it in many-layered allover compositions. Historical scenes appropriated from arcane sources are warped, distorted, pulled apart, receding and dissolving into the paint, hard to make out.