History

Alexis Rago was born in Rome in 1959. His early training was in biology, graduating with honours from Manchester University. During this time his interest in art gradually arose out of a need to move away from the constraints of the scientific method. However, many of his interests during this period inform much of his current work, including taxonomy and paleontology.

He moved to Florence to study art at the Institute for Art and Restoration. During this time he immersed himself in the study of mass, volume and colour concentrating mainly on painting and printmaking with particular focus on the traditions of the 'bottega', artist's workshop, and working from life. He remained in Italy for a decade during which he exhibited widely, culminating in the solo show, ‘Traces of Life,’ at the Montespertoli Biennale, Florence which subsequently moved to London’s Bolivar Hall. By this time his work had radically changed from the exploration of surface light to a darker, more introspective analysis of human archetypes and resurgent atavism.

On return to Britain his work began to take on the non-objective elements of his experiences in Italy, distilling them into works that concentrated on formal underlying structures and chromatic values. Concurrently he started experiments with primitve photography in a re-evocation of his early paintings through the use of pinhole photography. This departure from painting ushered a period of search for a new means of expression that could bring together the many ideas he had gathered including, archeology, biology, religion and cosmology. The time element played an important part in his photography using long exposures in what he called, 'the capturing of time in a single image'.

During this period he also began working with clay, a material he had encountered at various points of his development and as early as school. With clay he was able to evolve a language that increased in complexity until reaching its present expression. He was able to combine aspects of volumetric enquiry with the surface treatment found in his paintings, moving in a natural progession away from two dimensions. This process was coupled with the chromatic restraint of his photography by leaving the clay untreated in order to allow the material to communicate its telluric associations without restraint.

A year ago Alexis was been elected as a Fellow to The Linnean Society of London.