ART-PRESENTATION: Alex Dordoy-The Moss is Dreaming
Alex Dordoy’s practice concerns the tension between physical forms and their representation as flat images. He is interested in the interplay between the physical and virtual worlds and the combining of new digital technologies with traditional materials. In his paintings, he alters found images in Photoshop, exploring their dimensions and textures through filters to produce technologically inflected abstractions of the original images. He develops complex collages where the original sources are lost. He transforms those images to handmade objects or paintings.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blain|Southern Gallery Archive
Alex Dordoy has been invited by Tom Morton for the first in Blain|Southern’s new series of exhibitions, collectively titled “Lodger”, a new series of exhibitions at Blain|Southern, conceived by the writer, independent curator, and Contributing Editor for frieze magazine, Tom Morton. Running concurrent to the exhibitions in the central space, the series expands Blain|Southern’s programme into new territories, often spotlighting a younger generation of artists. Alex Dordoy for his exhibition titled “The Moss is Dreaming” developed a new body of work exploring a central characteristic of 21st Century visual culture: the restlessness of the image, and the instability of the surfaces on which it manifests. Poised between representation and abstraction, the organic and the digital, his work appears to have been pollinated, or perhaps infected, by stray data. Hanging from the gallery walls, and existing at an ambiguous point between painting and sculpture, Dordoy’s “skins” are made by using liquid silicon to cast the interiors of old photocopiers. Once dried, this fleshy material picks up not only the machinery’s inverted form, but also the streaks of ink and dirt that have built up in its hidden ridges and gullies – traces of its history of use. For all the ghostly charge of these works, they also reflect on photocopier technology’s enduring place in daily life, despite its long-predicted obsolescence. The images that appear in Dordoy’s paintings are initially composed using cut paper. Next, they undergo countless digital tweaks in Photoshop, until the relationship between their bold colours and simple, abstract forms achieve the necessary tension, and they are finally transposed to canvas. While their large size insists on their object-hood, the precision of their formal elements speaks of their genesis as much-overwritten files.
Info: Curator: Tom Morton, Blain|Southern, 4 Hanover Square, London, Duration: 4/10-11/11/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 10:00-17:00, www.blainsouthern.com
