Alex Kanevsky’s show, Everything Twice, on view at Hollis Taggart gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan until December 28, made me reconsider my long-held opinions about the artist’s paintings. Kanevsky, a former painting professor at the now-decadent Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, is heralded as a father of “disruptive realism.” This style breaks up conventional realistic paintings with flourishes of color, spooky auras or distortions that remind one of television static or a blurred photograph. He scatters this motif across the surface of his paintings.

Despite his status as a kind of celebrity among living figure painters, I always felt that something was wrong with his art. Photos of his work often look cold and jagged, and his figures are disquieting and uncomfortable to look at. It is not that I ever disliked Kanevsky’s paintings; in fact, quite the opposite. I always enjoyed them, especially the buttery appearance of some of his kitchen still lifes.

However, upon getting a closer look at his work, I realized I had completely missed small details that make his paintings soft and pleasant. Photos simply do not do his paintings justice. Even high-quality photographs of his work do not capture the colors, textures, brushstrokes and physicality of his paint. These qualities bring life to images that look hard and robotic in photos.

The limits of photographs

Some of Kanevsky’s work, especially his still life paintings, are not disrupted by random shapes, scenes from another setting sharply interposed into the space or other white noise. These paintings are more solid and blocky, reminding me of the celebrated British painter Euan Uglow, who constructed his paintings more tightly than Kanevsky.

Before seeing Kanevsky’s work in person, I had associated him more closely with Uglow. The softness of his paintings never fully came through in photographs. The most unsettling aspect of my previous photo-mediated perception of Kanevsky was the vector-like way he seemed to paint skin — it felt uncomfortable but reminded me of Uglow’s figures. However, in person, I discovered granular details, fine brushwork and delicate transitions between shapes in the skin of his models. These were details I hadn’t noticed before.

Photography gave many artists and art lovers the unprecedented ability to view great art at home through art books and, later, the Internet. Unlimited access to the medium is one of the great luxuries of modern life. However, this access took us away from the experience of viewing art with our own eyes. Is it really a good thing that we have a different experience at home than at a gallery or museum where we can see the work before us? How do we even know what we are missing? Do viewers of art books and scrollers of art accounts on social media ever feel compelled to go out to see art in person?

Betty Cunningham Gallery recently opened the online show, The Wound is the Place the Light Enters, which showcases artist Jake Berthot’s drawings and paintings. The show’s online nature highlights the drawbacks of digital viewing. The exhibition is underwhelming because of the small size and low quality of the images. This does a disservice to these mysterious artworks. Fortunately, photos of Berthot’s work that are much higher-quality can be found elsewhere on the Internet, and of course, in-person viewing would be more captivating. I hope the deficiencies of online exhibitions are enough to make them hangovers of the post-Covid-19 era.

The case for viewing art in person

In our post-Covid-19 world, our soft skills remain rusty and our individual online media experiences envelope us. So, a benefit of going out to galleries and museums is the in-person experience so many of us are missing. One of the greatest pleasures of visiting a gallery is meeting the artists.

I met Kanevsky. Speaking with him was an absolute pleasure. He displayed humility and humor (made more enjoyable by his Russian accent) about his place in art history and the admiration he receives from many figure painting students. Unsurprisingly, he does not work from photographs.

I also ran into a former professor and New York art critic at the show. My opinion of Kanevsky’s art was changing right before my eyes as I absorbed new visual data; I had to share my insights with this critic. He believed that the flourishes, decorations and ornamentation that fundamentally changed my view of Kanevsky’s paintings were the primary problem with his work. He thought these elements were like a cheap garnish that decorated the paintings.

This disagreement is a matter of taste, clearly. I found these embellishments attractive, tasteful and sophisticated. I would have never come to this conclusion if I had not shown up in person and engaged in the tradition of “close looking” at Kanevsky’s work.

Viewing art is a communal experience

We humans are unique in our desire to reflect life in images. Like nearly all our activities, viewing art is more pleasurable when it is a communal experience. The stunning mosques, cathedrals and other temples that dot the Earth are spaces where communities gather; something that unites them is that they are adorned with beautiful images, ornaments and calligraphy.

I am not arguing that galleries and museums are secular temples. However, imagine the intimacy people would miss if they merely sat alone to look at photos of breathtaking spaces, such as Notre Dame or St. Peter’s Basilica, instead of visiting them in person. Kanevsky’s paintings, like all sacred spaces and great art, demand physical presence to achieve a desired aesthetic effect that photographs cannot provide.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.