For his latest exhibition, Alexi Worth presents a group of three-part paintings, colorful and puzzling ensembles of disparate images.  “More like triplets than triptychs,” as Worth describes them, the new works resemble rebuses or comics sequences, bands of adjoining, semi-independent pictures that complicate and complement each other. Each has a different scale, touch, and temperament, a different claim to our attention. Together, they create an associative, subtly enriched kind of pictorial experience.   

Several of the trios began as portraits, or reflections on individual personalities, among them poets, artists, and politicians such as Wallace Stevens, Richard Artschwager, George Washington, and Steve Scalise. None are straightforward likenesses. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that old-school, “university president” style portrayal would make sense for a metaphysical poet like Stevens, who appears here as pure shape, a pale portly profile wedged between a geometric storefront and a ragged-edged street puddle–images perhaps of the “ordinariness” that was a leitmotif in Stevens’ poems.  

In general, though, Worth avoids explicable connections among the images. What he aims for, Worth says, is “the feeling when a song changes key.” Sometimes the wing images act more like a chorus, supporting the center in a way that suggests traditional European polyptychs. At the same time, Worth’s lean, “shape-and-surface-conscious” compositions leave no doubt that his work descends from artists like Artschwager, no matter how much he might also love the Master of Flemalle.    

Since 2010, Worth has been developing his own distinctive formal language, marked by translucent mesh surfaces, frontal lighting, and combinations of brushed and sprayed color. Here all these elements combine with a new iconographic range and humor to create compound images that speak directly to the fractured attentions of 2024.