PORTRAITS OF THE HUMAN BODY

Alexander Van Armstrong is a mid career School of London expressionist, notable for his post Francis Bacon treatment of the human body and for his portraits. He is best known for his monumental heads, often likened to the stone monoliths of Easter Island. The artist lives in the South of France.

As to influences and aesthetics, he has deep roots in the Old Masters - Masaccio, Leonardo, El Greco, Velasquez and Rembrandt, and has reprised a number of their works. A case in point is his obsession with Leonardo’s unfinished masterpiece, Saint Jerome and the Lion.

As a School of London painter, it’s no surprise that he shares artistic DNA with Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud. However, his paintings are generally much bigger, and clearly informed by a more Romantic spirit.

Further, while Bacon and Freud were unmoved by developments in post 1950 New York painting, Van Armstrong eagerly adopted the huge scale and raw energy of action painters like Jackson Pollock.

The big surprise is his uncanny ability, no doubt hard won, to seamlessly temper all the high voltage stuff with sfumato and chiaroscuro, painterly refinements associated with Leonardo and Rembrandt. This is much in evidenve with a painting like Nemesis 2.

His career is a tale of two cities. LONDON and NEW YORK.

He has had success on both sides of the Atlantic having his work privately funded by powerful individuals - a common arrangement during the Renaissance.

His most influential New York patron is Spike Lee. The film director has done much to support this British artist’s sophisticated work on culturally significant African American icons and since 2003 has commissioned portraits of Jack Johnson, Malcolm X, Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and President Obama.

Lee currently owns 30 of the artist’s pieces, a number of which will be on show at The Brooklyn Museum, beginning October, 2023.

In his book, Success and Failure of Picasso, British art writer John Berger divides painters into two camps : those who are content to depict the bourgeois world of common place themes and objects, and those who are drawn to tragic-heroic subject matter.

Van Armstrong belongs to the latter camp, and found in the struggle of men like Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali, the Promethean iconography he was searching for.

Such men dealt not only with the legacy of sustained physical hurt common to their profession, but had also to shoulder the immense political and cultural burden of being what people expected them to be.

As Ken Burns points out in his documentary, Unforgivable Blackness, Jack Johnson was never forgiven for being the first black Heavyweight Champion.

Johnson cast a long shadow. A generation later, Joe Louis found himself under constant pressure to at all costs distance himself from Jack Johnson.

Another generation later, Muhammad Ali would consciously adopt Jack Johnson’s defiance. He paid a heavy price, alienating most of America, when, in the course of his first press conference, he declared - “I don’t have to be what you want me to be.”  Only later would Ali gain acceptance.

Van Armstrong’s work on Jack Johnson owes much to Spike Lee’s encouragement. The film director owns Jack Johnson 1.

In an age of multiple flickering images, it is a shock to behold the massive stillness of Joe Louis 3.

First one is struck by the overwhelming physical impact of such a painting. You may then begin to perceive that the painting is densely layered to an extraordinary degree, built up layer by layer, perhaps as many as 50 layers, representing 4 months labor. Van Armstrong is clearly not one for shortcuts!

Conventional expectations of portraiture and likeness are here transcended. A mysterious alchemy transmutes oil paint into an astonishing evocation of what it felt like to be Joe Louis - of what it felt like to be this profound man, respected still by millions.

Joe Louis 1 was commissioned by Spike Lee for the movie She Hate Me. One of the main film sets was built around the painting.

At 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall, The King of Pain is one of the most extreme paintings of our time.     

It reprises Francis Bacon's adoption of the triptych as a formal device, while preserving much of the poignancy of Bacon's heads. But at 100 times life size, it does so on an unprecedented scale.

Like many of the Monumental Heads, The King of Pain echoes something of the Romantic sentiments of Shelley’s famous sonnet Ozymandias, which muses on the idea of human grandeur erased by the passage of time.

Nemesis is a sophisticated reimagining of a famous fight, the first of the Joe Frazier / Muhammad Ali trilogy, better known as The Fight of the Century.

This one of a kind artwork is on a heroic scale.

Nemesis is in the form of an installation of 15 huge paintings, each 8 feet tall and up to 16 feet wide. 

In 15 thrilling close ups, the inner life of a great fight is portrayed with power, refinement, pathos and unexpected lyricism.

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Van Armstrong’s nudes are medium sized paintings by his standards, though the treatment of the human body usually ends up somewhat larger than life size.

They share a quantum of artistic DNA with both Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, while affording a more hedonistic perspective. 

Van Armstrong’s small portraits of painters and composers are densely layered masterpieces of expressive intensity. 

Each conveys an eidetic sense of being.

Van Armstrong’s body of work, considered as a whole - the nudes, the small portraits, the giant portrait heads and the treatment of a famous boxing match - identifies him as a true powerhouse of contemporary painting.

Sebastian Ferretti 

August 2023