The Brooklyn Rail

So arch, so witty, so guided by ideas is Alexis Ralaivao’s show that it might be construed as a revival of the anti-realist Mannerism of Pontormo or Rosso Fiorentino. Ralaivao’s perverse version of Mannerism manifests itself first in the concetto (or conceit) that these twelve oils on canvas are painted exclusively in black and white, so they are in effect paintings made to imitate photographs from an era before color photography. Ralaivao is not like a Weegee armed with brushes, so he avoids overt violence, managing instead to capture instants of passion, of erotic arousal, even ecstasy. The origin of these powerful but subtly expressed passions lurks in the source of his title, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s 1934 essay “In Praise of Shadows.” Ralaivao’s titles allude to matters Tanizaki discusses, but his work is far from a mere illustration of the Japanese novelist’s ideas.

In the final paragraph of “In Praise of Shadows,” Tanizaki summarizes both his aesthetic of half-light and his sense that something central to Japanese culture is being lost:

I have written all this because I have thought that there might still be somewhere, possibly in literature or the arts, where something could be saved. I would call back at least for literature this world of shadows we are losing. In the mansion called literature … I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly.

Ralaivao assimilates Tanizaki’s defense of “this world of shadows,” but translates it into his own black-and-white aesthetic. We are, after all, in the time of Tokyo’s neon Ginza, not in pre-World War II Japan. The deliberate exclusion of color in his version of grisaille is an attempt to recover the drama of the bygone era of black-and-white film, when the erotic could flourish in a totally artificial, colorless milieu, where suggestion meant more than pornographic display.

Take the first image we encounter: Le Sac à Main (2024). The picture, as we would expect in a Mannerist piece, is deliberately fragmentary. A handbag dropped or tossed onto the floor, its contents—a notebook, a pair of pearl earrings—spilling out. In the upper left, the toes of a pair of women’s shoes. We long to know what’s going on here: is this evidence of violence or merely giddy abandon? Everything suggests this is a frozen instant in some ongoing action, and our imagination, in the way our visual sense in a Gestalt experiment completes a partial picture, generates a story. Ralaivao performs the same trick in an even more mysterious way in Le Raffinement Est Chose Froide (2025) where a hand adorned with a pearl ring grasps some fleshy but not easily identifiable object. The title is a direct quotation from Tanizaki’s essay, “But as the poet Saitō Ryoku has said, ‘elegance is frigid.’” Tanizaki is pointing out how difficult it is to heat a traditional Japanese house without sacrificing beauty to utility, while here, in Ralaivao’s piece, there are sadistic implications that might send us to other works by Tanizaki, especially Quicksand, where multi-sexual frenzy takes center stage.

Inviter Le Chaos (2025) appears to capture female sexual ecstasy, though, again, there is nothing overt in the picture, simply a woman facing front, her head thrown back. But the sheer size of the image (94 ½ by 78 ¾ inches) overwhelms the viewer with passion. The Mannerist close-up, or cropped image, reappears in two paintings that invite erotic interpretation. Le Gant Noir (2025) is a woman’s face, her head shrouded in dense hair, eyes shut and face hidden by a black glove, underscoring the idea that while glove fetishism is aberrant behavior, intrinsic and irresistible to certain individuals. L’Étreinte (2025) is a close-up in the style of Alfred Hitchcock, where all we really see of the embrace are clasping hands. Ralaivao merely suggests, allowing viewers to invent their own narrative or provide their own interpretation.

A seemingly innocent still life, almost in the style of Jean Siméon Chardin, Dernier à Table (2024), shows a table covered with a white cloth, white cups and plates, and shiny silverware. One diner remains at the upper level of the canvas, reading a book, while at the opposite end one cup remains upside down, never used. It is here Ralaivao discards Tanizaki’s aesthetic of darkness—his preference for lacquered, dark cups and his abhorrence of dazzling metal—in favor of Western brightness. But Ralaivao’s brightness obscures meaning as much as Tanizaki’s darkness invites ambiguity. Is the “last at the table” waiting for someone who will never arrive? Is the act of reading a kind of narcissism, with the text standing in for a mirror? We will never know, and this precisely is the delight of Ralaivao’s painting.