An essential, path-breaking first document from an elusive and important new voice in the world of painting.

Manuel Alejandro’s work is phantasmagoric and possessing of a singular vision expressing itself across paintings abstract, symbolic, colorful and dark. Bodies and faces, flesh and symbol, all fixed in unknown tableaux, fading in and out of unearthly textures and landscapes. XIVIX: The Collected Works of Manuel Alejandro brings together the oeuvre of one of America’s finest young painters for the first time. An anomaly in the modern world of art – accepted to Parsons but rejecting it and holding no higher education, living in Brooklyn without selling his work – Alejandro’s visual art stands obstinately on its own, establishing a new road for the next generation to imitate, independent from hypercapitalist machinations and compromise. Almost exclusively using oil on canvas, these paintings (along with a series of revelatory drawings) rejuvenate traditional methods and make them bracing, strange, and full of possibility.

Beautifully bound in hardcover as the debut project of Crop Circle Press, the latest venture from Naomi Falk, MoMA rights coordinator and editor for Archway Editions/powerHouse Books, XIVIX is both a bold representation of an anti-commercial spirit and a work of art unto itself. Featuring brand new texts from editor Falk, along with Sophie Golub, Mina Hamedi and Chris Molnar, all of which act as another level of artistic accomplishment, refracting Alejandro’s work through the lens of prose and poetry.