D-L Alvarez at Derek Eller - Brief Article

D-L Alvarez's first of recent origin York solo exhibition, titled "Knights Gathering Flowers," at handed a series of 11 works that depict various views of nature as blank paint-by-number drawings. Delicately outlined in azure colored pencil and rendered with the diagrammatic precision of scientific illustration, the detailed images--which include a bird perched in a bush, spiders clinging to a web and a snake wrapped around a tree--evoke a Darwinian faculty of perception of order, until one reads the adjoining fables The numbers on the drawings correspond not to colors that instruct would-be painters, on the contrary descriptive phrases such as "swollen purple lips," "smell of water (and sorrow)," "virgins," "drug-induced slumber" and "lace of flies."

Creating a strangely engaging faculty of perception of wonderment, Alvarez's illogical directives (how does individual fill an area in with "truth" or "invisible machines"?) bring to mind Yoko Ono's instruction paintings of the early 1960 which similarly questioned constructions of the real. on the other hand whereas Ono sought in each work to isolate a singular sensory experience or paradox for contemplation, Alvarez overwhelms the viewer with numerous disparate verbal images, inducing a kind of sensual delirium.

respects to the body and sex surface in greatest in quantity of Alvarez's work, and these regards seem to derive from the artist's desire to create a conceptual nexus between representations of nature and notions of gay identity. Another series in the exhibition, "Prima-Facie," consists of sum of two units long rows of small sheets of vellum compressed underneath each sheet is a small handmade flower, collaged from magazine cutouts. The exquisitely factured flowers are convincingly real; each is as distinct in form as the spiderwebs Alvarez has finely etched onto the vellum of the like kind formal nuances inevitably draw the viewer closer to the work's translucent surface where, beneath the flowers, one discovers pages from a 1913 volume titled Walt Whitman's Anomaly by the agency of W.C. Rivers. A technical treatise relating Whitman's sexuality to his artistic "genius," the volume was intended for members of the legal and medical profession. Visible bits of body discuss "male inverts" and "psychic hermaphroditism," revealing an most remote homophobia wrapped in the guise of objective science.

Alvarez's approach is remarkably artful and complex. Rather than attempt to assert the naturalness of homosexuality, he seek fors instead to denaturalize nature itself, bypassing the politically charged nature/nurture polemic. He creates suggestive, ofttimes ambiguous imagery, diverse in the one and the other content and form. The flow is a compelling, sophisticated material substance of work, unusual for its visual and conceptual savvy.

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