How to Reappear Completely
24 Karat Bowie Relic, all handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold and oil paint on birch panel in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frame. 55 x 37 cm. MARS Gallery at SPRING 1883 art fair, Melbourne. August 2025.
“One cannot help but directly think of Giles Alexander the artist in relation to the maxim Know Thyself. As a painter he belongs to a long standing academic tradition of virtuously handled oil painting and precision draughtsmanship, yet he stands aside from this, quite purposefully drawing attention to moments where he departs from tradition. This is not willful contrariness; Alexander uses and abuses his polished aesthetic as another way of interrogating his world, provocatively challenging the established ‘norm’ and questioning all that we hold dear.”
Kate Bryan, British art historian and curator, director, The Fine Art Society, New Bond st, London.
Nothing Compares to Thee, All handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold leaf and oil paint on double-sided concertina triptych birch panels, in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frames. 55 x 111 cm.
“Some artists, for instance Rubens, Seurat, and Australia’s Jon Cattapan manage to combine abstraction and figuration within the same canvas – as did Turner; others have long periods of one style before switching to the other – Peter Booth and Philip Guston, for example, or switching materials – paint to sculpture – as did the mid-career Linda Marrinon, or from neo-expressionist painting to screen-based installation in the evolving works of Susan Norrie. And a very few – Richter, Andy Warhol, Louise Weaver, and Giles Alexander – progress abstract and figurative careers simultaneously. There are new technical frontiers to conquer, new ways to appraise the past and the future, from Renaissance chapels to rather big Hadron Colliders. With the vision of William Blake, combined with the “anything’s possible” philosophy of Elon Musk, Giles reels off the future challenges and the past seedbeds:
Peter Hill, Artist Profile Issue 57, 2021
I was 5 years old when John took a shellacking, all handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold and oil paint on birch panel in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frame. 55 x 37 cm.
Every single one of us, the Devil Inside, all handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold and oil paint on birch panel in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frame. 55 x 37 cm.
24 Karat Amy (and the Ronettes) Relic, All handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold and oil paint on birch panel in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frame. 55 x 37 cm. MARS Gallery at Sydney Contemporary art fair. September 2025.
“While there are a great many artist with the patience and physical skills to create beautiful detailed realist paintings, there are very few I consider to be “post modern”, contemporary and history making. I am always looking for new ideas in Imagery, composition, technique, surface, scale, content and of course ideas. Giles Alexander has all the qualities of, and is making paintings, which do qualify him to be carrying on the overall line of art history associated with this genre I have devoted my career to. The response to his work in its inaugural showings on 57th street in the center of the art world, and in my booth at Art Miami, and the comments and responses therein, have proven this to me.”
Louis K. Meisel, New York gallerist and coiner of the phrase Photorealism
I learned of Wolf’s Howlin’ slavery’s spirituals across the Muddy cotton Delta Blues harp, All handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold and oil paint on birch panel in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade found wood frame with raw cotton. 69 x 49 cm
Inter-Hemispherical Dawn Chorus, All handmade rabbit skin glue, gesso, bole, 24 karat gold leaf and oil paint on double-sided hinged diptych birch panels, in the trecento Sienese manner + handmade gilded frames + Bluetooth speaker with original musical soundscape.
“The marvel occurs within the rhetorical mode reserved for topics of the highest order. Such expression is intended neither to describe nor to prove, but to praise. The conceit allows one to speak of the unspeakable. Rather than labour over the details, it gives sense in a moment to the vastness of the matter. It demands that the beholder acknowledge that another order of reality is in play, otherwise he or she will be stuck in stubborn refusal to admit the impossible. The marvel insists that art is understood within the game of theatre. Wit and design are the magic arts by which seeing is deceived in a manner of astonishment, as the poet Marino once wrote. Alexander is at a crossing, waving goodbye to his youth. He is painfully aware that life allegorises itself. The father who imbued in him the love of architecture and perspective and history has gone. What awaits his own son seems fragile. The world is burning and demagoguery is on the rise; conditions are right for millenarian thinking.”
Dr Michael Hill, Head of Art History & Theory, National Art School September 2020
