More explicitly than ever before, Basil brings the physical and even intimate aspects of transmasculine gender transition to the fore. Images of the medical procedure appear on his laptop, which he repeatedly presents in his paintings – analogous to a canvas or sketchpad – as an essential tool for examining and visually appropriating his environment. Basil’s research led him to the life story of Laurence Michael Dillon (1915–1962), a Briton who, in the 1940s, became the first trans man to undergo phalloplasty – the surgical construction of a penis. In the corresponding painting, the artist’s own face is superimposed on Dillon’s portrait taken from Wikipedia – just as in other paintings it adheres to a broken key or to the lion on the tarot trump card “Strength”. By lending his face to objects and figures that have a personal connection to him, Basil conveys a sense of total penetration – of all that preoccupies his thoughts. Addressing the viewer, these small faces appear like an invitation to look more closely, to decipher them for oneself. And yet in a quite literal sense, they also gaze back at the viewer, as if the objects themselves were on the verge of speaking, “for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”¹

In the case of a doctor sitting in his office, drawing markings on the forearm of one of Basil’s alter egos, a resemblance to the artist cannot be substantiated, since his back is turned to the viewer. And, while what the figures are saying goes unheard, the mere fact they are engaging in conversation, marks a rupture in the otherwise largely monologic nature of Basil’s images – the painter has left his studio and he himself has become the canvas. At the very center of Basil’s practice stands the body as an evolving, dreaming, and feeling entity. His works reveal with striking clarity that a body’s being is not solely and automatically constituted by its outwardly visible, physical characteristics. In his works, there is a continuum between the corporal and the environment, between memory and imagination. Alexander Basil masterfully renders this continuum, sharing through his canvases the coordinates of his own development – both personal as well as artistic.

– Malte Lin-Kröger

Malte Lin-Kröger is the collection curator at the Kunstpalais in Erlangen. He studied Art History, Theatre and Media Studies, as well as Religious and Cultural Studies in Erlangen, Munich, and Istanbul. His recent exhibition projects include solo shows by Zohar Fraiman, Lewis Hammond, Simon Lehner, LuYang, and Zuzanna Czebatul, as well as Pattern Recognition, a dialogical and critical exhibition on the Municipal Art Collection of Erlangen.

¹ Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaïscher Torso Apollos, Poem from 1908.