The Brooklyn Rail

Diorama is the young figurative oil painter Alex Sewell’s fourth solo exhibition with TOTAH gallery. Sewell clearly possesses technical dexterity, with the eleven variably sized canvases on view appending painted objects—some crudely scrawled like children’s drawings, some flattened against the picture plane in a primitivist-Cubist manner, and others possessing significant verisimilitude—along vividly colored, even planes. In previous exhibitions, Sewell’s coterie of nostalgic painterly references included push-car mazes, childhood action figures, scrawled blackboards, video games, and VHS tapes. In this show, Sewell’s imagery is less self-involved, trafficking in landscapes dotted by types of objects rather than any particular cultural detritus. That is, there are cars, cigarettes, hands, chalkboards, and city skylines, but no identifiable consumables or geographies depicted. Sewell’s wistful suggestions of American urban and suburban semblances outstrip his antecedent coming-of-age vernacular, indicating the painter’s continuing maturation.

It is most welcome that Sewell avoids filling his canvases with heavy-handed cultural objects, instead filling and fastening pictorial space via inventive compositional choices. In one of his most recent paintings, Hope Rides Alone (2025), a cavernous, plum-black sky fogs the pictorial field; a modest pearl orb of a moon provides just enough luminescence to light up a partially submerged skull’s right eye socket from the obfuscated lower field. This is the sole memento mori in the show and figures more successfully as a foregrounded formal device than as a metaphor for the artist or viewer’s mortality, as the latter theme is neither sustained nor cultivated throughout Sewell’s other paintings. Given that Sewell’s compositions turn and return to looming stairways, highways, and plains leading to faraway off-canvas expanses, the theme of unmooredness is more perspicuously rendered than human impermanence. Sewell’s dissolution of space, which frequently leads into scattered vanishing points, features as perhaps the artist’s most aptly managed leitmotif, grounding his collocation and concatenation of swarming hammers, flames, rolling hills, and brightly lit but empty model homes.

Sewell’s paintings do not indicate yearning for an epoch or painterly lexicon past. These canvases present a mood rather than a place, undertaking the former with a degree of cold reservation. But Sewell is a postmodernist only insofar as, like David Humphrey, his works enjoy a degree of stylistic pluralism. Where Humphrey’s silhouette-based reductions make reference to worldly particulars (e.g., Fanta bottles and Tide liquid detergent), Sewell’s impressionistically painted shrubs, cityscapes, and figures shirk empirical signification. Take, for instance, the pixelated videogame sprite in Tower defense (2024) who floats on a balcony, deploying cannon balls. The (imagined) character, which represents but a sheer type, does not belong to any particular video game franchise. Such is also the case in the walk-up depicted in Brooklyn (2024–25). The tangerine brownstone draped with six asymmetric primrose windows is flanked by a cornflower-blue sky. The structure could very well be based on one of myriad Bushwick buildings, enveloped in an apricot sunset that has colored scores of spring and summer evenings. Tethering Sewell’s composite images to spatiotemporal anchors is to miss his broader interest in culling an ethos.

The most successful works on view are those that fill the pictorial field with objects arranged in different, though not clashing, painterly idioms and include at least partial trompe l’oeil tropes. The latter, which are quite visually commanding, find Sewell positing one or two exacting objects within an off-kilter scenography. For example, in Up and Up (2025), the detailed horizontal wooden boards cast convincing shadows and are precisely angled. Here and in Go back home (2024), this structure breaks through the abyssal subtending space, which, whether it be a canopy of clouds or a hollow dirt ditch, is painted far more indiscriminately. A host of Sewell’s paintings also keenly implement high-keyed color complements. Bathing his urban landscapes in a characteristically warm orange glow, Sewell galvanizes the tucked crescent sun of Study for Lazarus (2023), the in-dash radio of Fast car (2023–24), and the crenellated battlements of Our swords (2025) with an inner light.

The stand-out work in the show is Night Fishing (2024). This large-scale canvas is reminiscent of Manny Farber’s domestic flotsam and jetsam. Farber’s pictorial approach to still life objects was, itself, directed by Paul Cezanne, whose indirect influence is also apparent in Sewell’s elliptical severed hands. In Fast car, these hands palm a steering wheel and clinch a cigarette. In The Marsh road (2024), they balance a cherry red hatchback cut-out along a popsicle stick. Night Fishing’s faithfully painted severed hand looms below the fishing line referenced in the title, with Farber-esque arrayed elements strewn across a table-like plane. Jeffrey Grunthaner, in his essay, “Mixtapes, Video Games, and Painted Monuments to Disaster,” classified this swarming aspect of Sewell’s paintings as their “Rube Goldberg Machine” quality. But unlike Farber’s still life networks, Sewell’s optical flurry often involves fantastical facets. With Night Fishing, a buttery stretcher bar, painted into the background, peels forward in the upper-left corner, meted out by a whirling celeste-blue sinusoidal line that cuts across the midnight water. To the upper-right of the monofilament, the hoary moon is held in place by a bisecting piece of translucent indigo tape. Along the marine floor, a chalked fish head laps seaweed. The lines comprising an orange orthogonal lattice drag near the seabed, hanging above the pincers of a red-hot lobster’s silhouette. To its right is a cigarette butt, flagging beside a mustard reef.

Where Faber's slow studies of the visible world consisted in painting objects directly from life (viewed at a bird’s eye view), Sewell’s paintings draw as much from fantasy as episodic memory. At this point in his painting career, Sewell’s strength is most evident in his arrangements and in his stylistic pluralism. Using off-center compositions, Sewell’s multi-planar mosaics consist of Lilliputian objects oddly arranged so as to produce optically interesting and fantastical environments. Where they touch, these objects do not necessarily interact. Given the painter’s enormous potential and apparent interest in art historical tropes like the memento mori, this reviewer wonders if Sewell might continue wresting his objects from nostalgic reverie and plumbing symbolism, which would allow him to coalesce his now established technical talent with nascent conceptual riches.