Alex Chaves

The five paintings of Alex Chaves: Titanic present a broad range of subjects, all of them haunted by a peculiar crossroads of modernism and leisure. Screen grabs of online chess, skyscrapers, an Italian renaissance depiction of a battle of knights, LA artist Marisa Takal, and the RMS Titanic - domineering in its constant closeness. Titanic evokes turmoil and nostalgia for art of the past with its moody scenes of the city and a dark blue sea. Uccello’s The Battle of San Romano (1435-1460) gets resituated into a wooden, flowered frame with a screen grab of an online chess game overlaid. Titanic imagines the unconscious of the RMS Titanic's passengers. The paintings’ linguistic surrealism represent the visionary dreams of the passengers of the first-class megalith that unfathomably sank in 1912. Beauty, doom, memory, urbanism, conflict, sexuality - the tenor of Alex Chaves: Titanic is analogous to its title-subject, the historic RMS Titanic. The tragedy of the RMS Titanic endures and continues to captivate us because it is a modern fable of human hubris and the faltering promises of technology, industry, luxury, and class disparity.