Alexandra Noel

In her painting, Alexandra Noel seems to deploy all the conventions for the depiction of our everyday lives in a style which is not hyper-figurative, but hyper-visual, forever leaning towards an exaggeration of the visual field, be it microscopic or macroscopic, while also being ready to stretch over an approximate 180-degree angle. And this work is even akin to an attempt at an extreme perception of objects and environments in an analytical retranscription. Her works on intimately scaled wooden or stone panels, explore a vast range of subject matter and styles. Within their consistent format they often represent an exhibition in itself, like in “moveable walls” series — fragments of the gallery architecture showcasing precisely selected routine objects due to their shape, visual effects or their link to reality. Each painting is an aftermath of sophisticated layering of ideas and perspectives — tornado is seen from a car window, pieces of cake surprisingly find themselves under the table, tiny snail visits an exhibition of painting, rubies and red blood cells roll from a huge mountain. Alexandra Noel introduces her illusionistic method by constantly inverting scales and sizes, making miniature objects appear bigger and vice-versa, zooming in and out, seeing from from above or seeing from a section view. The Droste effect is about a picture appearing within itself - Alexandra Noel’s effect is about a recursive picture appearing within an elusive reality, constantly altering the paradigm of viewer and subject.