Alexis Soul-Gray

The corruption of innocence is a key theme in Alexis Soul-Gray’s paintings, drawings and collages. Soul-Gray explores the two-fold quality of tenderness, which implies kindness and also sensitivity to pain. Combining exquisite linework with brutally expressive drips, Soul-Gray’s childish figures emote playfulness, fragility, and longing. The artist delicately renders, and then violently rubs out, scenes of posing and performing children, evoking a lightness of being yet simultaneously suggesting the haptic burden of their bodies. Soul-Gray paints to process her lived experience, but rather than depict her own family she works from imagery in Renaissance art, found photo albums, and 20th century advertisements. She sources British knitwear catalogues from the 1950s-90s, because they evoke not only the look but also the touch and feel of another era, ‘where family is often faked but also unpredictably felt,’ acknowledging the fallibility of perception and memory; the most cherished ones are also the most embellished. Through veils of washes in blue and gold, Soul-Gray’s children seem to be trapped in a vision of the past, and then rise to the surface with a burst of lifelike realism.