Approaching the atmosphere of the exhibition Rivers and Rooftops, the first solo show by Alfie Caine at Massimo De Carlo London, is like flipping through a childhood postcard, cut and reassembled: the molding of a house, the road descending to the sea, the tablecloth with oranges all return to memory, familiar yet renewed by a chromatic palette that makes them suspended, lucid, and subtly unreal. Alfie Caine, trained in architecture before turning to painting, works with space as if it were raw material of desire; his canvases do not merely record a place, but construct it as a condition of feeling.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
The first impression is that of flat color: pink, green, blue, yellow – tones calibrated somewhere between interior design and an 1980s poster. These surfaces do not seek mimicry but generate an emotional atmosphere; they are panels of memory that invite affection and contemplation. Citing a few titles that already tell us much – Sunset and Oranges, Yellow Bed, Strawberry Moon, Riverwalk, Road to the Sea, Pink Bed – a domestic and natural lexicon emerges, where the humblest objects (a bed, a bowl, a cat) acquire the dignity of everyday icons. Caine composes his scenes with the discipline of a designer. Perspective is rigorous, and interiors follow an internal logic reminiscent, in accent and measure, of certain Renaissance experiments. Not by chance does the artist speak of learning from the painting of the early Renaissance. Yet here, perspective is not a tool of topographical truth but a device that orients desire. Rooms, rooftops, and river paths become maps of perception rather than geographic correspondences. From this viewpoint, Rivers and Rooftops is less a guide than a sensory journey, a walk through the suspension of time.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
Time is perhaps the true material of Caine’s works. His surfaces appear still yet full of expectation: a watchful dog, an orderly bed, a bowl waiting for a hand. In Road to the Sea, installed above the gallery fireplace, the crouched dog watches the road leading to the sea – it does not seem to rush toward anything concrete, but rather to wait: perhaps for someone’s presence, perhaps for the exact moment when the light will change. This waiting is not anxious; it is comforting, almost therapeutic. The calm it emanates is built from flat color planes and soft brushstrokes that avoid the ostentation of representation and favor subtle suggestion. The combination of acrylic and vinyl on linen is integral to this suspended atmosphere: vinyl lays down flat, luminous surfaces, acrylic defines contours with soft precision, and together they create an image that seems drawn from a restored memory, familiar yet more vivid than reality. In Sunset and Oranges, for example, the oranges cease to be a simple still life; they engage with the landscape, becoming presences that mark the passing of time and the seasons of dwelling.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
The domestic space in Strawberry Moon is one of the most successful examples of this poetics of suspension. The large canvas (182.5 × 244 cm) depicts the interior of a room from which a red – fragile, carnal – moon emerges through the windows, while a bowl on the table functions as a compositional pivot. The insertion, on the wall, of a small painted work (the same Green Hill, 40 × 40 cm, also displayed on a side wall) creates a game of miniatures and reflections: the smaller work inside the larger one produces a short-circuit between fiction and reality, as if the painting revealed itself on multiple levels, referring to the artist’s own practice. It is a gesture about the scale of seeing and how a painting can contain, within itself, an entire emotional spectacle.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
Animal presence in many of his works – cats or dogs – is a constant, affectionate motif. Their gaze, or simply their rest, quietly activates empathy and establishes a dialogue with objects, light and the possibility of a future gesture. In their postures, a kind of mediation accumulates between inside and outside, between room and time. Here familiarity returns, yet slides toward a barely impossible dimension: the space where Caine places his scenes, a territory where every form appears known and yet slightly off-register, as if following an internal law that does not coincide with our own. In this subtle deviation, the animals become silent guardians of an intimacy that remains real but already brushes the imagined.
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
What unites the series is less a linear narrative than a shared feeling: the sense of home as a desired refuge, the landscape as a place reflecting the psyche, color as recoded memory. The visual overlaps between the paintings and the repetition of certain icons — the pink bed, the road to the sea, or a table – draw a geography of images that always returns to the idea of “expectation.” It is a waiting that does not demand immediate answers but rather opens onto a contemplative practice. In a season of art where painting is often expected to deliver urgent messages or radical gestures, Caine’s delicacy appears countercurrent: restoring slowness, reclaiming intimate space as a place of aesthetic and psychological experience. His painting does not renounce modernity – on the contrary, it embodies it through vinyl and synthetic colors – but uses it to recreate a world where the everyday becomes sacred again, or at least worthy of attention
Alfie Caine, “Rivers and Rooftops”, 2025. Installation view, artwork © Alfie Caine. Photo by Todd-White Art Photography. Courtesy MASSIMODECARLO
Rivers and Rooftops does not ask the viewer for solutions but for the willingness to stay, observe, inhabit. Alfie Caine constructs rooms for the soul, architectures of the possible rather than portraits of a single reality. And as animals, beds, roads, and strawberry moons traverse them, a simple truth emerges: painting can still create spaces where time stretches and waiting becomes a form of care.
Info:
Alfie Caine. Rivers and Rooftops
20.11.2025 – 10.01.2026
Massimo De Carlo
16 Clifford Street, London W1S 3RG, UK
Massimo De Carlo.com
She graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Catania. During her lifetime, she has experienced various arts including sculpture, theatre, dance and photography, and the latter one became the springboard for her eclectic and innovative artistic path. In 2010, she approached the art curatorial world and started to write reviews and critical texts; later, she founded “Artisti Italiani – arti visive e promozione”, an organisation which deals with all the promotional aspects of contemporary art.
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