Back from the beginning.

• Author: Snow, Mitchell
• Position: Alex Flemming

"Fica um pouco de seu queixo no queixo da sua filha. A bit of your chin remains in the chin of your daughter." Alex Flemming is both quoting Brazilian poet Carlos Drumond de Andrade and explaining the nature of his work. Stretched out behind him is a series of massive canvases - blinding white mummies on backgrounds so brilliantly colored that they throb with a strange kind of life.

In the artist's 1990 one-man show in the United States, it was clear that the processions of mummies arranged about the gallery walls were inter-related. But there were other almost subliminal links as well. In fact, the mummies were set against backgrounds constructed of multiple, fragmentary repetitions of elements from other paintings in the gallery. What first appeared to be an obsessive calligraphy pulsating in the background of one of the larger works became, on closer examination, a detail of the elaborate sarcophagus from a nearby painting. A head from another work could be found, sideways, in a different corner. Every inch of every canvas was the offspring of some other work in the series.

Flemming's paintings are produced by combining large, handcut paper stencils and acrylic paints. While the central figures for each work are formed by painting over freshly cut, hard edged stencils, the backgrounds begin with the weakened, softer-edged stencils from earlier works. His "images thus change and grow older with repeated service until finally they are no longer of use," Boston Globe art critic Mary Sherman observers. As a result, the technique itself forms a part of the artist's message.

"Everything will end, and that is precisely what is reflected in these works," the artists says. Ironically, he has selected some of the most enduring, mythical images from the history of man to make his point. Perhaps his most telling series is a group of Greek gods, drawn from the pediments of the Parthenon and other familiar sources. Juxtaposed with their recumbent forms are larger than life photographs of the human regulars of Brazil's famed beaches.

"The gods of Greek antiquity are gone. The sculptures themselves are going. Their arms, hands, and part of their legs have been knocked off. And of course, the models themselves have been dead for at least 2,000 years. It is no different today. In a very short time, the adonises at the beach will be 30 and fat," Flemming declares. In some of his earlier works, the human figures were designed to fade over time, just as the...