A Thin Place: Alex Bierk

Press release by: Cynthia Cruz

 

I

Over the course of our correspondence, Bierk sent a number of emails in which he attempted to articulate his process, what his work is trying to accomplish, and where his inspiration originates. He did so through various means: lyrics from a Bruce Springsteen song, references to visual artists whose work and lives have been instrumental to his own, and his personal writing in the form of vignettes. These repeated attempts point to language's inability to align with what we want it to say. Language always misses the point—there is always a gap between language and what we are trying to grasp with it. Something always falls through.

In other words, Bierk's repeated attempts to articulate in language what his work is trying to convey is, in itself, an articulation of what his work is doing. That inherent gap—and what falls through it—precisely mirrors language's inherent failure. It is also as close as one can hope to get to describing Bierk's art practice and the paintings it produces, which attempt to convey that excess: the "something that falls out" in the process.

 

II

Bierk's work begins with a photograph—one that captures the moment setting the entire process in motion. In this sense, it is the capturing of the moment and not the final painting, that is the artwork. The moment the photograph captures seems to appear out of nowhere. This contingent occurrence aligns with what the French philosopher Alain Badiou calls the Event. Like the Event, it cannot be predicted, and it can take any number of forms. Such occurrences are also marked by retroactivity: one can only comprehend what has transpired after the fact. "It is the event," Badiou writes, "which belongs to conceptual construction, in the double sense that it can only be thought by anticipating its abstract form, and it can only be revealed in the retroaction of an interventional practice which is itself entirely thought through.”

The event is a window that opens suddenly and closes just as fast. It is a moment of twilight—a fragile threshold between worlds where the possibility of something genuinely new comes to the fore. The title of Bierk's show, A Thin Place, refers to this moment when the veil lifts and the fragile space between worlds is briefly revealed. That suspension is a site of great risk and danger. It is also the site of infinite possibility.

 

III

In Negative Dialectics Adorno describes what he calls the Addendum, or Hinzutretende, which translates to an “added” (hinzu) “step” (tretende). As Adorno writes, “It is a flash of light between the poles of something long past, something grown all but unrecognizable, and that which some day might come to be.” This “flash of light,” coincides with twilight, the window of danger and opportunity that appears briefly between worlds. Twilight’s window of possibility exists for a mere moment before it collapses. 

Reconstructing this inarticulable moment — this window or flash — is labor-intensive, akin to Durcharbeiten, or "working through": the slow, rigorous process of repetition that the analysand, or patient, undergoes in psychoanalysis over the course of years. Bierk's "working through" involves entering the suspension, the original flash of twilight, in order to fill it in through depiction. This suspension ultimately functions as a kind of placeholder — a mirror of the threshold between the moment captured in the original photograph and the impossibility of ever truly reconstructing it. What remains is only the gap between the two, and its inevitable loss.

 

IV

Bierk was trained to paint using the grid technique, a system that goes back to the Old Masters. The process, used to achieve proportional accuracy, begins with a simple grid on the source image and a corresponding grid on the painting surface. Painting top to bottom, left to right, the mechanical process allows something entirely new to come to the fore. In other words, paradoxically, the constraint and structure of the practice of making and filling in the grid, a highly mechanical process, keep the conscious mind distracted, allowing the unconscious to enter the process and short-circuit the conscious mind. As Bierk explains, everything he is immersed in during the period he is making the painting, everything he has absorbed, enters the painting, though, of course, not consciously. Rather, this excess enters the work the way the unconscious forms dreams. And yet, unlike a dream, here, the unconscious does not materialise in a dream but, rather, a libidinal quality that enters the work in the form of an inarticulate excess, an enigmatic quality that illuminates the painting. This quality is brought to the fore vis-à-vis the something that falls out when one attempts to access it through language, appearing in the work as a force within the artwork that cannot be located, that illuminates from within. In other words, the flash that appears seemingly out of nowhere that sets the entire process in motion, the contingent occurrence that Bierk captures in a photograph, results in an artwork that attempts, through a form of deliberate dissociation, to bring about this initial flash.

 

V

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel tells us that art makes the spectral appear. This appearance, or what he calls Schein, is more real than reality. Indeed, art makes appear the structures that would otherwise remain invisible to us. It makes differences in appearance, appear. Art has, in other words, the ability to make difference appear. And if truth is a specter, an overdetermined semblance that, though it forms every aspect of our lives, remains invisible to us, art has the ability to make this entity re-appear. This re-appearing, a form of haunting, is what the viewer sees in Bierk's paintings which are neither photo realistic reproductions of the original painting nor complete departures in the form of pure imagination or fantasy. Rather, the paintings are a working through of the two, aiming for an approximation—not the photo, not a realist depiction of it. 

 

VI

Bierk's paintings can be understood as portals to another world. And yet, this other world is the one we inhabit, a world that has become invisibilized through habit. We live in this world but we no longer see it. The paintings allow us access to this other world.

This aspect is most pronounced in Bierk's paintings of automobiles. In these paintings of cars that, though recognizable as cars, because they are older models—mostly 1970’s or ’80’s sedans—when looking at the paintings, one has the sense that there is something in the work one is unable to grasp. It isn’t nostalgia. Rather, it is as if the painting holds somewhere within it—not on the surface of the artwork—an excess. This excess draws the viewer into the work. Because this supplement remains out of view, the viewer is invited to engage in the act of working through, paralleling the artist’s labor-intensive working through that resulted in the painting. Fredric Jameson describes a similar process in his essay on Neo Rauch, “Reunified German Images”:

 

The pieces of the past that drift down into Rauch’s canvases […] are too fragmented to bear much in the way of a political charge. He tells us that they come to him at night, imperiously soliciting expression; and what they preeminently express is the fragmentation of German history, which, at the center of Europe, experienced war on many fronts, from the Roman Empire to the Thirty Years War, and on into the long and bloody twentieth century. Their representations demand a reunification they can only find on the canvas and through the energetic interpretations of their beholders.

 

What Jameson describes as Rauch's "pieces of the past" coincides with the anachronism visible in Bierk's paintings of automobiles, which appear simultaneously contemporary and historical. Just as Rauch's amalgamated images draw the viewer into the canvas to work through and complete their floating, fragmented forms, Bierk's paintings pull the viewer in through this same paradox. In both cases, the work becomes collaborative and communal—the individual artist's vision extending outward into the universal.

This resonates with Bierk's deep investment in community. He apprenticed under his father, the late David Bierk, who was a painter, and his work remains in close dialogue with Peterborough, Ontario, the town where he grew up and to which he eventually returned. Bierk's commitment to his community extends beyond painting: he serves as city councilor for Peterborough and is currently the Chair of Homelessness. This civic dimension adds another layer to the paintings. The world Bierk advocates for—marked by homelessness, poverty, drug addiction, and mental illness—exists in plain sight yet remains invisible to those who move through it untouched. His paintings enact this same structure: they become a portal through which viewers are able finally to see what has always existed before their eyes.

 

 

¹ Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. by Oliver Feltham (Continuum, 2007), p. 178.

² Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton (Routledge, 2004), p. 229.

³ Fredric Jameson, “Reunified German Images,” Granta, 165,  23 November 2025 https://granta.com/reunified-german-images/