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“I wanted this feeling of alienation to come across in my palettes and in my image choice - this feeling of being outside."
Alexis Schofield is a painter who creates impressionistic compositions based on found photographs, his own personal archive and, more recently, images generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Utilising charcoal drawings, pouring inks and oil painting on raw canvas, Alexis seeks to create meaning through the layering of materials and textures.
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Editorial
Biography
Alexis Schofield (b. 1982, Pretoria) currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Our Calves Demand a Wolf is his third exhibition, following Impressions (2023) and Feed (2023) at 99 Loop Gallery. His work has been included in a number of group exhibitions, including Sessions at 196 Victoria (2024) and Hot Spell (2023) at 99 Loop Gallery as well as art fairs such as RMB Latitudes (2024) and Investec Cape Town Art Fair (2022 - 2024).
Exhibitions
The exhibition’s title, Our Calves Demand a Wolf, comes from a Russian expression that might find its biblical equivalent in Proverbs 17:19: “Whoever builds a high gate invites destruction.” That is, ambition courts disaster. The proverb could apply to any number of examples of human hubris both ancient and modern. Our Tower of Babel demands the confusion of our tongues. Our unsinkable ship demands an iceberg. Our nuclear weapons demand annihilation. Our technological progress demands a hotter planet, its rising seas and forest fires.
Vela Projects is proud to present works by five Cape Town-based artists for the second edition of RMB Latitudes Art Fair 2024.
Nine works by three painters presented in anticipation of Vela Projects’ gallery opening on the 9th of December 2023.
This body of work is concerned with artificiality—specifically, how we consume images in our current paradigm, as the line between artificial and real becomes increasingly blurred.To do this, Schofield paints from reference images that have undergone several rounds of distortion.
First, the artist generates an image—or a series of similar images—by feeding prompts into AI. By extracting elements from its output and collaging them together, Schofield creates a new and unusual composition. He translates this to the canvas, improvising along the way with a range of materials and techniques.
Eco Anxiety, for instance, combines frenetic charcoal line work with expressionistic, Chaim Soutine-style strokes alongside a cool, flat grey scale gradient as well as planes of raw canvas. The image, at first glance, is hard to digest—it might even appear abstract—but upon closer inspection, its detail scan be made out: unmistakably, that image, there in the centre of the composition, has the tension and the sheen of a bin bag.