“fullmoon” is a bit of a homecoming for Adam Alessi. The artist has been averaging around one solo show a year since his sudden art world ascent about five or six years ago, but with the last two having taken place in Italy and New York, Los Angeles has rarely seen his work since his 2022 show at Smart Objects. The occasion itself is splashy enough as any to inaugurate Hoffman Donahue (a West Coast – East Coast merger between Hannah Hoffman and Bridget Donahue’s operations) and Marc Selwyn’s new shared space on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills, where Hannah/Bridget and Marc will alternate exhibitions. It’s all a lot less complicated than it sounds, and the mood on the evening of the opening at the end of September was sufficiently celebratory that attendees seemed refreshingly unconcerned with anything as tiresome as gallery strategy.
A second type of homecoming is presented through Alessi’s return to figuration. His last solo show, at Barbati Gallery in Venice, was completely abstract. Gridded color fields, which had sometimes lurked around his signature uncanny figures, filled up entire canvases. In “fullmoon,” almost all the backgrounds are somber jewel tones, traces of which can be detected in the underpainting of the cadaverous faces. If Alessi’s paintings are getting a little scarier, it’s partly through the starkness of the figures against these backdrops, and the general feeling of cohesive performativity their danse macabre creates within the gallery.
Adam Alessi, Dear Friend, 2025. Courtesy of Hoffman Donahue.
This reflects a new development in Alessi’s work. In previous shows, the figures could all pass for inhabitants of the same off-kilter dream world—a motley cast of characters in a slightly spookier, yet familiar version of our own. Here, the paintings all seem to inhabit not just the same world, but the same pictorial space—maybe a realm between life and death, between the unconscious realm of the mortal and the all-conscious realm of whatever figures live in the beyond. The three solitary figures in Shiver, Heh!, and The Wave (all works 2025) (installed next to each other on the same wall), almost read like the three Fates of classical mythology, themselves the archetypal predecessors to the Weird Sisters of Macbeth, and many subsequent witchy trios of the popular imagination. It’s precisely in their temporal ambiguity, which seems to harken to some form of murky historical reference, that they connect to an unparsable but intriguing symbological tradition less obviously present in Alessi’s earlier work.
There is also some newly emergent reflexivity baked into this cast, in Painter, a pallid artist in a black cloak and hat gazes at the viewer, tilting his palette as if to display a stigmatic proof that the works were indeed conjured by the human mind, and thus implicating all who view them. The unfinished face in Contemplation similarly reveals its own connection to that which is human-reared, as do the heavily matte black areas throughout the show that stand in for the figures’ clothing. The viewer is confronted not with a jump scare, as in some of Alessi’s previous paintings, but with the slow burn of the unresolved. There’s even a memento mori moment in Dear Friend, where a skull in a cloak turns its head out to whatever’s behind it.
The works’ reflexivity is explained a bit in a short text by Alessi in the press release, where he shares that these latest works were painted following the artist’s recent experience with sleep paralysis, specifically after a particularly severe episode that forced him to “meditate on the thin line between consciousness and unconsciousness.” Perhaps the paintings and the painter are both on a type of threshold, caught between familiar territory and somewhere more introspective, and informed of the artist’s own understanding of consciousness.
