Vela Projects is proud to present Our Calves Demand a Wolf, Alexis Schofield's third solo exhibition and his first with the gallery. The exhibition’s title, Our Calves Demand a Wolf, comes from a Russian expression that might find its biblical equivalent in Proverbs 17:19: “Whoever builds a high gate invites destruction.” That is, ambition courts disaster. The proverb could apply to any number of examples of human hubris both ancient and modern. Our Tower of Babel demands the confusion of our tongues. Our unsinkable ship demands an iceberg. Our nuclear weapons demand annihilation. Our technological progress demands a hotter planet, its rising seas and forest fires.
In this exhibition, Schofield focuses on Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a particularly fascinating synecdoche of the age-old Promethean error. Its developers promise that it will provide cheap, risk-free labour, optimise decision-making, and offer unbiased solutions to the world’s problems. In practice, however, a number of unforeseen consequences have arisen that have fostered a culture of distrust around the new technology. As AI becomes more proficient in analysing and mimicking human-like behaviour, the sense that we don’t know whom or what to trust compounds.
“As AI develops, we will become further codependent, as the interface between us and it becomes blurred,” says Schofield. “Therefore, I wanted to incorporate the AI into my practice by using the machine to generate images based on drawings I had done.” As he paints, using layers of charcoal, ink, and oil on raw canvas, Schofield creates a dialogue with AI, feeding it images of works-in-progress and prompting the programme to generate different images based off his compositions.
“I am interested in how we find ourselves interfacing with machines,” the artist says. “AI has been trained on our interpretation of the human form but does not actually understand it, so this gap between knowing and understanding leads to very interesting images.”
Accordingly, it is the human form that is rendered most bizarre in Schofield’s paintings. Limbs swirl as if caught in a vortex or meat grinder. Indeed, they are so distorted that they are nearly unrecognisable. What looks like an abstract shape from far away becomes, upon closer inspection, a latex-clad arm, or a sinewy foot. Often, these figurative elements spill into absurd forms, like an inflatable balloon or a crocodile tail. Familiar objects, like a rug or a window, tether the senses, while fleshy globs and metallic protrusions throw them off. Delicate washes of ink volley with bright neon greens and pinks.
“I wanted to create paintings that the viewer can spend time with,” Schofield says. By working layer by layer, material by material, tool by tool, “treating every step as its own image,” he is able to create paintings with an incredible sense of density, much in the same way that hellscapes by Bosch or Bruegel are dense.
In fact, Schofield’s compositions share a surprising number of affinities with these 16th-century Netherlandish painters. The chrome-jawed, sabre-toothed mouth in Protocol Tondal (2024) could be the mouth of hell in Bosch’s Christ In Limbo (c. 1575). The flailing legs of Exodus (2024) could be one of the demonic figures in Bruegel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562). The melting pot of intrigue and calamity with which we must contend every time we turn on the news or doom scroll on social media bears an eerie resemblance to mediaeval visions of apocalypse. Schofield contends that this is because “every age has had anxiety about the future.”
While the techniques used to create Schofield’s paintings feel distinctly contemporary, unexpectedly classical elements in pose, light, and form reflect the timelessness of this concern. Descent (2024) seems to suggest a classical depiction of Christ being taken down from the cross; his ribs are exposed, and his arms are spread in the style of the crucifixion. Golgotha (2024) sees an arrow pierce a leg in a way that recalls traditional portraits of Saint Sebastian. The blueish ink splashes in Synthetic Arbor (2024) recall the celestial skies of El Greco’s View of Toledo (c. 1596–1600), while the long, distorted limbs, stretched between heaven and hell, remind one of the Vision of St. John (c. 1608–1614).
For time immemorial, artists have been interested in what it looks like when humans push the limits of their capabilities. For Bosch, Bruegel and El Greco, the limit was God, and the ambition to surpass God had to be punished spectacularly. For artists like Francisco de Goya, José Clemente Orozco, or Samuel Bak, the limit was pushed in the brutality of war, which the artists witnessed during the Peninsular War, the Mexican Revolution and the Holocaust, respectively.
Like them, Schofield’s paintings can be monstrous and apocalyptic, but these paintings differ in their alienated detachment that speaks to contemporary life, a life which is increasingly mediated through machines.
If Schofield, like his predecessors, is an observer of apocalyptic anxieties, what constitutes apocalypse today? It’s not God’s will. It may not even be man’s folly. Perhaps it is an ambition which exceeds our own human comprehension.
Our Calves Demand a Wolf observes an aesthetic world that is both humanist and inhuman. Not just an image of apocalypse, but an apocalypse of images, as seen through an eye that is, uncannily, both man and machine.
