Lido 2000

Peter Alexander made ‘Lido’ as some kind of meditation on light, and what I love is how the colours seem to bleed into each other, like watercolour dreams, but it’s paint, so how does he *do* that? It’s like he's trying to catch a memory of a palm tree, or maybe the feeling of sunshine on your skin. Look at the way the red bleeds into the yellow, so that you can almost taste that feeling of being burned. It’s so subtle but when I look, I can see the brushstrokes like soft whispers across the surface and these layers of pigment seem to glow from within, so that I can see the physical act of making, but then there’s these hard black lines, like a slap in the face, but that’s life isn’t it? Alexander reminds me a bit of David Hockney, with that whole west coast vibe, but what Alexander does is all his own, he pulls you into this space where things aren't quite what they seem, where colors vibrate and shapes shift and that for me is the magic of painting, right there.