December 4, 2025–January 31, 2026
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Everything Twice
by John Yau

Alex Kanevsky is a figurative painter who belongs to no school, follows no tendency, and has neither a signature style nor a recurring topic. Other than working on rectangular supports, his resistance to being pigeon-holed offers us a way to reflect upon his treatment of traditional subjects, such as the model, landscape, and still life. By rejecting familiar stylistic devices, such as surrealist dreamscapes, expressionist distortions, and impressionist views, Kanevsky has developed a unique approach to figuration. The result of this approach is a diverse group of paintings, which have been known to baffle even his most loyal viewers. The most common way these viewers have responded to their bafflement is by concocting narratives about the meaning of Kanevsky's paintings, and the motivations behind them. This has led to many misunderstandings which I will attempt to clear up in this essay.

All Possessions Twice (2024) depicts a prison cell bunk bed -two shelves extending from a wall. On both of the spare, neatly made-up bunks, we see all of the anonymous prisoners' worldly possessions carefully arranged for inspection. Almost as if we are prison guards, we begin visually sorting through each person’s things, mentally noting what they have, and how each set of items is different. What we make of the fact that a similarly colored carton of toothpaste is found in each collection depends on who we are. Context is all.

Formally, the two shelves, one stacked above the other, function as planes on which we see a still life. The pairing seems to have little to do with traditional still life, or with well-known modernist views of tabletops by Paul Cézanne, Pierre Bonnard, or Henri Matisse, none of whom depicted still lifes within the confines of a prison cell. Kanevsky’s unconventional choice should clue us into the subversive nature of his choices. By picking prisoners' things as his focus, we lead to ask: is the artist commenting on the history of still life painting?

Once we begin focusing on the banal objects neatly arranged on each bunk bed, we will likely notice that there is a pillow on the top bunk but none on the bottom, and that the surface of one bunk is blue while the other is green. By now, we have accepted Kanevsky’s invitation to look deeper into the painting, to begin to closely examine similarities and differences, and to pay heightened attention to the distinguishing features of banal things, such as the color and size of each individual’s slippers. As we go further to the painting, we might start to ask ourselves, what are we looking for, and where will this looking take us.

If "God is in the details," as the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was known to have said, what might we get from itemizing the things neatly arranged in All Possessions Twice? One anomaly that stands out is the reproduction on the wall above the lower bunk. It shows a woman in a white gown, set against a black ground. Her head and lower body have been cropped. Turning away from us, and posed in three-quarter profile, we see her bare right arm extending from the top of the reproduction to the bottom edge. The image feels both extraneous and necessary to the painting, which infuses it with an irresolvable tension, a visual provocation.

What is the relationship of this faceless, anonymous figure to the two absent prisoners and their possessions? Doesn't her presence in the painting open it up to speculation about the role she plays? Is she a surrogate for the viewer or for the absent prisoners? What does it mean that she is facing away from the painting and looking into the darkness surrounding her? While these questions help us to look more closely, the answer eludes us. Might not that elusiveness be an ethical one? Might not Kanevsky be probing the limits of seeing rather than settling for what he sees?

One of the hardest things for a figurative painter to depict without resorting to familiar tropes is a scene where nothing significant is going on. In three identically-sized paintings from 2024, all of which are given the same title, Hay Bale with Snow, and consecutively numbered, Kanevsky pivots away from a prison cell to focus on a rotted hay bale lying in a snow-covered field. Thematically speaking, this view shares little with Kanevsky's still life. The difference between them conveys something of the artist's astonishing ability to find fresh subjects within well-known genres. Kanevsky understands, as the poet Robert Kelly wrote, "Style is death." With this understanding, he defines a territory, where seeing the world as specific instances, no two alike, is paramount. Even when he returns to a subject, each view is different, as exemplified by his three distinct views of the rotted hay bale.

As with the prison bunk bed, Kanevsky has found a subject that challenges our assumptions. He doesn't regard the hay bale as part of a thematic group, as did Claude Monet. Again, we are tempted to construct a narrative, one in which we see the rotted hay bale as a commentary, perhaps on waste and excess. From there, we can connect the hay bale paintings to what the artist focuses on in All Possessions Twice, which on a simple level is incarceration. There is something satisfying about connecting the paintings this way, particularly in light of climate change and the misuse of the prison system. While I grant this socially relevant, over-arching narrative is more than plausible, I don't think it contains Kanevsky’s work. Instead, I think the work’s inability to contain something so direct and transparent is its real strength.

Kanevsky, who doesn't believe in either narrative or parody, has little interest in aligning himself with topical correctness or being entertaining or amusing. Although his paintings belong to the genres of still life and landscape, they are not stylistically connected, and the inseparable conditions they make plain is that of isolation and time passing. A prisoner's daily life is regimented during the time he is isolated from society. The rotted hay bale is left in the field, imprisoned in its uselessness. Of no value, it is isolated from the world because its time of usefulness has passed.

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