Alexander Tosha

I am a bricoleur, in the sense used by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss in his book The Savage Mind. Bricolage is a characteristic pattern of mythological thought, is the skill of using whatever is at hand, and recombining things to create something new.

I spent most of my adult life processing, filtering, and recombining information, working as a software developer for major US corporations. My paintings are filtering the light, reducing images to dots and letting the eye and brain reconstruct and give meaning.

In 2009, while working for Bank of America in downtown Chicago, I discovered my interest for breaking down images into simpler forms of information, expressed by black dots on large canvases, and wrote a custom software to do just that. The intent was to use the help of a projector to transfer these images with oil paint to a canvas.

In 2019, ten years later, while on a 4th of July trip to Boston, I got the idea to disassemble a CNC machine, cut and drill aluminum bars, and rebuild it into a larger one, capable of painting big canvases. Also took my 2009 custom software and repurposed it to generate painting commands, instead of just outputting images to a projector.

At the end of 2019, everything ...