8.26–9.5.2026
Alex Chaves
The Development Center:
A Clownache Store
The Development Center transforms NOON Projects into the temporary home of Clownache, Alex Chaves' direct to consumer curatorial art and fashion project. Functioning simultaneously as an exhibition, working studio, and retail space, Chaves will be in residence, painting a mural inspired by the architecture of early Modern Los Angeles while presenting a new series of watercolors alongside T-shirts and editions.
The Development Center draws upon themes central to Chaves' practice, examining the legacy of Modernism and the shifting ideas of identity, artifice, and image-making that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Working through a dialectic of critique and homage, Chaves frequently refigures iconic paintings by artists such as Picasso, Vuillard, and Gauguin into his own distinctive visual language. Like the painters he references, Chaves considers how moments of rapid social, technological, and cultural change shape the images we produce and consume.
The exhibition looks to the mythology of early Los Angeles—its Orange Empire and its colonial fantasy as the "Paris of the West"—as a framework for new paintings that freely collapse historical and contemporary imagery. References to Labubus and Diet Coke sit alongside portraits, flowers, imagined landscapes, and wrought-iron locks and keys from fifteenth-century Europe, creating an expansive visual vocabulary that moves between romanticism, spirituality, commodity, cultural heritage, and the fluidities of gender, sexuality, and morality.
The watercolors in The Development Center reveal a more intimate dimension of Chaves' practice. While he has long produced works on paper alongside his paintings on canvas, this marks his first exhibition devoted entirely to paintings on paper.
Clownache proposes that paintings, clothing, and editions all carry the same artistic intent, weight, and merit. The project initiates a direct relationship between artist and audience, offering works that range from unique paintings to hand made t-shirts and editions, each produced through Chaves' singular visual language.
Presented for a limited engagement at NOON in Chinatown, The Development Center offers visitors the rare opportunity to encounter Chaves' practice as it unfolds. As the mural develops throughout the exhibition, the gallery remains an active studio, inviting audiences to experience the evolving process while exploring the complete world of Clownache.
Alex Chaves (b. 1989, Summit, New Jersey) works across painting, drawing, performance, and writing. His portraits are often artistic peers depicted within domestic interiors, pairing expressive painterly surfaces with an interest in psychological intimacy, sensuality, and art history. His work contains many referential underpinnings; he often constructs a visual pun or question by performative appropriation. Across mediums, his practice considers the politics of beauty, interpersonal relation, and the ways we fetishize objects and create meaning. Chaves lives and works in Los Angeles.
