Unbelievable fictional scenes straight from the mind of Alex Roulette

What a nice surprise to discover that what I first thought were some particularly beautiful Flickr photos turned out to actually be incredible paintings by artist Alex Roulette. What you may at first assume are very well recreated holiday snaps are actually fictitious scenarios completely fabricated out of Alex’s mind. The summer memories format reminds you of all the photos of friends you’ve taken that no one else will know the value of, which is given an interesting spin by the fact that Alex has made these people up, they were never real, and what you are seeing never happened. A strange concept now that we are all so used to seeing thousands of internet-based images a day of things that did happen, and didn’t take anywhere near this level of imagination.

“I begin each new work by gathering a large collection of source material. I meticulously photograph environments and collect found images such as vintage postcards. In constructing the painting, I use combinations of these reference images, to fabricate an open-ended narrative with the emotion of a memory. Drawing collages of image fragments onto panels before painting them in oil. The resulting paintings are both realistic and subtly uncanny, recalling some idealized vacation and a deeply personal longing for past experiences.”