Alex Coppola
Launderette Records
3142 Richmond St.
Philadelphia
Showing July 5 - Aug. 31, 2025
Seen July 5
This past Saturday was the opening night of a month-long showing of local artist Alex Coppola’s latest series of paintings, a set of portraits that complicate the divide between figuration and abstraction. Hosting the exhibit is Launderette Records, a store and venue in Philly's Port Richmond neighborhood that, since opening a few years ago, has supported a bevy of artists and artworks. Their curation is fun, freaky and irreverent, whether screening mostly-forgotten B-movies and independent films, assembling DIY music shows inclusive of everything from gentle folk to aggressively experimental rock and electronic music, or lending their walls to exhibitions and installations of bold visual art.
Though all eminently recognizable as portraits, the artist’s new show mischievously evokes the art of stop-motion photography; digital distortion (especially the artifacts resulting from poor uploads or transfers of image files); and, most simply, faulty mirrors, or wet surfaces rippling. While Coppola often paints his friends, a few of whom were in attendance to observe and pose with their portraits, he also culls images from web searches for inspiration. The odd-looking portrait of the already delightfully odd-looking Steve Buscemi as seen below is evidence of such.
In practice, the work confronts the viewer with the notion of multiplicity, of painterly paths not taken. A smattering of unsettled perspectives nevertheless coheres into a concrete image. It’s almost like viewing an entire photo shoot’s yield in a single shaky frame; each subject has many eyes, many ears, many mouths and noses, all blending, layered and overlapping. No one feature quite achieves primacy over its variants.
The paintings, especially the large works, are effective in their refusal to sit still; the viewer’s eye, in finding difficulty knowing where to rest, is drawn to the alloverness of every figure. The result is a powerful sense of having divined the essence perhaps more deeply than in a traditional figuration, as though you’d glimpsed the subject alive in – or just beyond – the canvas.
Though the unique approach itself is what lands the first body blow, Coppola’s keen eye for expressive nuance is unmistakable and in no way undermined by the iterative approach to expression’s representation here. The most engaging paintings on display, to my eye, are Coppola’s wonderfully affectless self-portrait alongside his portraits of couples. In these, one figure often infiltrates the space of another, as though they are physically inseparable. Within these larger frames, Coppola packs an extraordinary amount of detail so that the effect, rather than obscuring or merely distorting the subject, feels generous and additive. There is a palpable sense of the painter’s pleasure in not having to paint aspects of the subject only once, but again and again, savoring small details from slightly different angles. It’s a bizarre, even alien strategy of depicting the abiding affection between subjects – and really endearing, too.
It was an added bonus to view these striking paintings in one of Philadelphia’s most colorful and creatively-stocked record stores with a packed house, a King Sunny Ade LP on the turntable, and a cooler full of complimentary wine, beer and seltzers at the ready; not to mention the DJ set that followed, courtesy of Inez (pictured and painted at the top of this article), and under watch of all thirteen (give or take) of her portrait’s eyes.
