Urban Panels by Alex Losett
As a lifelong denizen of large cities, I feel embedded in the very fabric of urban life. Cities’ stories in stone, stories long and short, call out to me to be told. But I am not so much a history painter or a visual novelist as a Haikou poet. I have chosen the most mundane and ubiquitous urban artifacts—sidewalks—as the subjects of this portfolio of panels, each one executed with the care and precision of a few well-turned lines of verse.
Every day, we walk the streets. We use the same routes, again and again. Often we look down, especially in bad weather. For longtime city residents, the “views” of the sidewalk take precedence over all other sights, but they do not get much attention in art. In creating the Urban Panels, I wanted to bring these sights into artistic focus.
Each panel deals with a small slice of reality—a minimal narrative, a few visual elements—but strives to investigate formal and conceptual depths. By working with very limited restricted vocabulary, I unearthed endless expressive possibilities.
The panels are positioned at the intersection of painting, collage, and sculpture; in terms of genre, these works reside somewhere between still life and landscape. All the panels are very textural and all are positioned within a limited color range. There is little to no imaginary, perspectival space. There is no up or down, no right or left. These creations can be shown as floor or as wall pieces, viewed separately or arranged and re-arranged in large panneaux.