The Brooklyn Rail

Unexplained interventions into the landscape are the stuff of which legends are made, and the English countryside has its fair share. The most famous is Stonehenge; the most recent, the crop circles that appeared in the country’s southwest farmlands throughout the 1990s. Less internationally known, but equally mysterious, are the chalk figures scattered across hillsides throughout rural England. One of these, the Litlington White Horse, is Alfie Caine’s lodestar for the seven paintings that make up his debut exhibition in New York, The Chalk Carver’s House.

A prehistoric chalk horse located about a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Litlington may have been the initial inspiration for the Litlington White Horse, but nothing is certain. A nineteenth century farmer and his family likely created the gigantic horse, but conflicting local stories about its origination add to its mystique, as does the fact that it has been occasionally reworked by other hands over the years. This is how myths are crafted: an original event in the distant past is told and retold, and in every retelling a bit of residue from each narrator accretes, until the story, though perhaps no longer an accurate account of the initial event, becomes truer by virtue of its compilation and synthesis of many stories.

In Caine’s show, the viewer is invited to consider the myth of the chalk horse through his distinctive frame within a frame: the subjects of his paintings (all dated 2025) appear set within windows, or viewed as if upon a stage. No people are present, but the mise-en-scène of each canvas is prominent. Golden Hills depicts a small, narrow house as seen through a doorway. The house is framed by a tropical flower in a vase, the silhouette of a dog, and reflective surfaces within the room that fragmentally bounce back images of the little structure. In the foreground is a lovely detail—two bananas in a dish upon a table. Caine’s colors, intense and vivid, and unnatural to the scene before us add a dreamlike, surrealistic character to the painting (this is true of his palette across all works). The fuchsia dog matches the fuchsia flower; the landscape and sky are an uncanny golden hue.

Golden Hills is the first of four interconnected canvases that loosely form a half-told story. The viewer seems to proceed through a house, encountering moments of intrigue through doorways and windows. The mythical horse appears in Nine Legs, in which there are, somewhat cheekily, nine legs. The horse’s are visible on a wall framing a door, and on a painting beneath a staircase. At the top of a staircase the dog reappears, its four legs visible in the upper right corner. The ninth leg is that of the single chair in the foreground which brings the viewer into Caine’s sophisticated geometry. His hallucinatory architecture seems most at home in reverie.

The dog returns later, sleeping beside a bathtub filled with water in Twilight Bath, while the horse is delineated in full, through a window, drawn into the hillside in Chalk Horse. The horse only ever appears in a form rendered by human hands, while the dog is the only living creature crossing these interiors. It’s as if the material world has abruptly ground to a halt. Perhaps we take the perspective of the dog, wondering about the stuff that has been left behind as it wanders through this scenery where detritus and objects have become totems of a nebulous past. A winding path that meanders across the plane and eventually off the canvas of Chalk Horse is symbolically blunt: the road is open to interpretation.

Two additional works, Shower Mist and Cliff Garden seem tangentially connected, while The Journey, a landscape as regarded through the window of a train, stands alone. They, like the others, are technically advanced while the narrative is murkily articulated. In a different body of work, this enigmatic approach might have been more confounding, but Caine seems to welcome, even encourage the perplexity. His province lies in the realm of worldbuilding, and encourages the viewer to invent the action at hand for themselves. The lack of didacticism nurtures free thought, a refreshing circumstance in the current moment.