“The Moss is Dreaming”
Blain|Southern
For the first in Blain|Southern’s new series of exhibitions, collectively titled Lodger, its curator Tom Morton has invited the young, London-based artist Alex Dordoy to develop a new body of work exploring a central characteristic of twenty-first century visual culture: the restlessness of the image, and the instability of the surfaces on which it manifests.
While Dordoy’s sculptures, paintings, and silicon ‘skins’ are preoccupied with their own materiality – their unique and bounded ‘thingliness’ – they are also deeply porous. Poised between representation and abstraction, the organic and the digital, his work appears to have been pollinated, or perhaps infected, by stray data. The broken Moebius strips of his sculptures employ wet jesmonite to absorb gestural passages of paint, the impress of corrugated card, and printed imagery including kimono patterns, alchemical symbols, and the artist’s own digital photographs of forest landscapes. Is this density of visual incident at odds with these sculptures’ modest – indeed domestic – scale, or is it only natural in an era in which that most commonplace of objects, the smartphone, seems to suck a whole universe of information out of thin air?
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. Perhaps a painting, today, is simply a technology for freezing the restless image, for fixing its coordinates in time and space. And yet, as the title of Dordoy’s exhibition, The Moss is Dreaming, suggests, even the most immobile of objects still fizz with lively data – on their surfaces, or deep within themselves.
