Richard Nagy Ltd. is delighted to present Several Flames, a solo exhibition of the Mexican artist Alex Hank, from 9th October to 1st November 2024.
The exhibition is a series of larger-than-life graphite on birchwood works.
Birchwood is a local wood from around his barn in Gsteig in the Swiss Alps. This choice of support was made to accentuate the robust masculinity of the subjects. The medium, graphite, is equally deliberate; despite the scale, it emphasises the spontaneity and delicacy of the nature of these same young men.
Hank loves the immediacy of works on paper and was inspired to do something that conjured this feeling while looking for a support that had more body and weight. The scale and the visible timber achieve this sense of corporeality. It has a density and firmness that reflects the maleness of the subjects.
These new works are of beautiful men – cheeky, superior, teasing and vulnerable – there is a feeling of the artist being enthralled, and yet the power dynamic is ambiguous. Hank is drawn to the aesthetics of his models. One senses a personal connection between artist and his sitters, but it is not explicit nor straightforward. The images of these young men, these portraits are revealing of intimacy, but they don’t give away too much. Not the status of the relationship, not the time of their capture, not anything other than the frozen moment of their immortalised realisation as art.
He captures their physical beauty, superficially and the inner resonance of their pensive gravitas. At the same time there is a hint of malevolence or at least something on the dark side of nature – a Dorian Gray quality. There is a sense of having to see beyond the mask to the real character of these sitters who do not wish to be unmasked. There is a conflict between the privacy of the sitter and the artist’s desire to see.
As an observer we want to understand and draw conclusions – we want clarity and exegesis. But we are left with something more complicated, something veiled that defies the simple explanation that lies behind the apparent beauty. Hank has left space for the viewer’s imagination that keeps the questions hanging.