Alex
Elbers
Canvas. Layers. Light.
Alex Elbers – Explorer of Material and Perception
Alex Elbers is a contemporary mixed media artist born in 1986 in Venray and based in Eygelshoven, the Netherlands. His practice centers on material control, perception, and construction, working primarily with self made inks and oil paints on layered and cut canvas.
Best known for intricate, multilayered compositions built through cutting, stacking, and reconstructing canvas fragments. These physical interventions generate depth, tension, and shifting light interactions that change with the viewer’s position. The work is deliberate and labor intensive, prioritizing structure, surface, and perception over gesture or narrative.
A key method within his practice has been dubbed Refracted Memories. Rather than illustrating memory, this approach investigates how fragmented color, pattern, and texture can activate residual emotional responses. Certain visual elements resurface a feeling without resolving into imagery, leaving perception incomplete and open.
Alongside this, Elbers develops In Situ With You, an ongoing series that responds directly to place, scale, and moment. These works are shaped by their environment, allowing context to influence material choices, composition, and structure. Each piece functions as a record of presence, emphasizing the relationship between the work, the space it occupies, and the viewer.
Elbers’ visual language draws from natural forms and systems of disruption and concealment. His work avoids figuration, narrative, and symbolic storytelling, focusing instead on constructed abstraction and the mechanics of seeing.
His work is held in private national and international collections.
Series: Refracted Memories
This ongoing body of work explores how fragmented color, pattern, and surface can trigger memory without relying on imagery or narrative. Through cutting, layering, and reconstructing canvas, the works create shifting compositions that reveal themselves slowly, depending on light and position. The focus is not on recalling a specific past, but on how visual fragments can activate a residual feeling that remains just out of reach.
Series: In Situ, With You ∞
Is a modular painting series that begins with a gesture and remains deliberately open.
Each work consists of square panels with smooth surfaces, built to engage with light through subtle reflection and contrast. A panel may hold a single decisive stroke, a compact abstract, or a fragment of a larger composition. No panel is meant to resolve the image on its own.
The panels are mounted with magnets, allowing them to be placed, rotated, exchanged, and expanded freely. There is no fixed grid and no predefined final size. The work can stay intimate or grow over time, responding to the space, the light, and the choices made around it.
The series is completed in place. Composition is not settled in the studio but shaped through presence and interaction. The artist initiates the system. The collector continues it. Each configuration is temporary, specific, and inseparable from where it exists.
