becker-art.net
Snapshots of life:
Alex Becker’s graphically-influenced paintings reflect the complexity of change and indicate
the dynamic processes behind the signs.
From his early years, charismatic ‚artist of living’ Alex Becker has been transforming his personal
perceptions into drawings and paintings. His encounter in the late ’80s and subsequent long-term
cooperative work with German painter and graphic artist Klaus Stallknecht left an imprint on
and intensified his inclination for graphically-influenced painting. Both in the course of his college
years and concomitant to his professional life as a graphic designer, Becker was striving to expand
his artistic repertoire in trans-regional exchange with artistic personalities (painters, filmmakers/
photographers and theatre actors) throughout the ’90s.
The dynamics and mulitdimensionality of Becker’s manifold sources of inspiration have left strong
imprints on his oeuvre which, next to his preferential field of work, includes collage, etching, stone
sculpture and mixed media. His vividly coloured and pithy pictures are recognizably influenced by
photography: Expressively minimalist depictions of motion caught in the moment, like freeze
frames extracted from a sequence, render visible the intenseness of the energy flow condensed
to evocative shape. To the artist himself, the act of painting is „like dancing“, imbued with vigour
and emotions – and thus always genuine. Becker’s focussing on the moment itself draws upon an
abundant reservoir of figural motifs, floral structures and abstract colour compositions which
open up a dialogue between ‚what has just been’ and ‚what is just emerging’. His works of art thus
often seem to be part of narrative image sequences, like fragments of an evolving story.
The artist obtains extraordinary translucent colour effects in his puttied-over paintings on dark
cardboard, the multiple layers of which evoke an almost haptic materiality. Intrigued by the
imaginable behind the visible surface, he keeps experimenting with varying transparent coatings
that ask to be deciphered step by step.