Alex Heilbron at as-is

Alex Heilbron, The Tools Dig Deeper (Pictorial) (2025). Acrylic on canvas on panel, 63 × 84 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and as-is Gallery. Photo: Deen Babakhyi.

I am most aware of screens when they break. A crack, a dead pixel, hardware on the fritz: These malfunctions, like knotted muscles or strained eyes, snap me out of the endless scroll and back to material reality. Alex Heilbron’s paintings provoke a similar awareness. The six works in All Systems Fail, her recent solo show at as-is gallery, seemed charged with the kind of friction our devices are designed to minimize, the kind that arises when the sleek, symbolic order of digital systems collides with physical laws of embodiment, breakdown, and decay. Heilbron borrows images from the internet, then laboriously hand-glitches them. Working first in vector files, she translates these digital images into vinyl stencils that she applies to five-by-seven-foot canvases, paints over, then removes. The resulting works stage material encounters with digital chaos, prompting viewers to consider the mutual entanglement of the digital and physical worlds. Here, glitches brought us to our senses.

The paintings in All Systems Fail felt like handcrafted datamoshes. Digitally-coded motifs like gratings and grids, matrices of hole-punched circles, and the stock image of a four-petalled flower proliferated across all six paintings. Reiterated in various states of glitch—enlarged and cropped here, stretched and pixelated there—these motifs are layered on top of each other, painted almost entirely in shades of pink, blue, and yellow. In Output System (all works 2025), a cobalt grid of four-petalled flower icons overlays a pink and yellow mishmash of partial grids and irregular patches. Transgressing these grids’ borders is an olive green scribble, pixelated at its edges as if “hand” drawn with a computer mouse. In size and texture, the work insists on its own materiality: This is a painting that was executed with a human body. Yet the painting process seems to have been infiltrated by digital systems, even as the artist hand-manipulated those systems to create the work. Here and throughout the exhibit, the paintings felt like digital decompositions, as if constant touch had worn holes in a JPEG file, or a computer virus had infected a flowering plant.

By making manifest the distortions inherent in replicating and storing digital information, Heilbron’s paintings gesture toward the ways the digital sphere and embodied experiences mediate and warp each other. The four-petalled flower icon, ubiquitous in these paintings, is a symbolic representation of a physical bloom—but flattened, blandly symmetrical, its form translated into the purely symbolic language of the digital. The flower’s relationship to its referent is complicated further as it is copied, its copies are copied, and generation loss accrues. The Tools Dig Deeper (Pictorial) centers a mesh of yellow and black flowers arranged in a tight grid. This iteration of the flower-grid is overwritten with a scrawled pattern of pixelated lines and surrounded by a cobalt field of black patches and pale pink circles. The grids of flowers and circles recall lines of binary code; in context, they echo the hole-punches in the paper punched cards of early computer programming. The painting as a whole, meanwhile, made me think of a motherboard that had been soaked with rain. Looking at the painting, then, one sees the code, the graphical display, and the painter’s handiwork at once, each element invading and disrupting the others. Digital tools and innovations often advertise as easy-to-use, seamless: These technologies will fold smoothly into our lives—whether we want them to or not. (Meanwhile, somewhere, invisible and ignored human labor assembles and maintains them.) By breaking apart the visual markers of digital spaces, Heilbron reminds us that the rigid order of those systems is conditional: We can shape them, impact them, and if needed, resist them.

The second law of thermodynamics holds that disorder increases; in a closed system, like our universe, every process, every exchange of energy, causes an increase in entropy. Looking at Heilbron’s paintings, I am reminded how possible it is to map this physical law onto the exchange of digital information. The more abundant and iterated digital data and images are, the more chaos seems to grow, as static and blur increase and the wild hallucinations of algorithmic entities threaten to corrode the same troves of knowledge that train them. Meanwhile, our attention scatters, dispersed between apps that insist we organize our thoughts and orient our bodies according to engineered interfaces. Like my thumb moving over a cracked screen, the paintings in All Systems Fail reminded me of just that —system failure—and located fractures in the digital order, sites where sensory, embodied awareness interrupts the scroll.