Alexander James (b. 1993) is a painter based in London. He creates artworks by combining moments of history, recent and ancient, in contrasting pastel and electric tones on large-scale canvases. In his latest works, James depicts reimagined moments of his every day, akin to film stills, to build a viewfinder into a narrative that defies temporality. The diaries that James paints become storyboards through which the artist is able to understand himself, the emotions he harbors and the history he has inherited. The mixing of actual and imagined experiences, a play between conscious and unconscious, is evident in the artist’s portrayal of his enigmatic great-grandfather – his profile captured with kinetic mark-making, layered with warm hues, and then scraped away into abstraction.