Alejandro Dorda Mevs aka Axel Void (Berlin, Germany)
Alejandro Dorda Mevs aka Axel Void (Berlin, Germany), ‘Nothing New for Trash Like You’,
Acrylic applied with syringe on found wooden table, 60 inches in circumference.
In collaboration with the US. Embassy of Ottawa, Canada.
Custom made for La Petite Mort Gallery in 2011.
Market Value $3500.
NOW $1200
ALEJANDRO HUGO DORDA MEVS
aka AXEL VOID
MEDIOCRE
Paintings, Drawings & Mural.
One Month Exhibit
June 3 – 26, 2011
This project is funded in part through a U.S. Department of State,
U.S. Embassy-Ottawa Public Affairs Section Grant.
“Every time a man is begotten and born, the clock of human
life is wound up anew to repeat once more its same old tune that has already been played innumerable times, movement by movement and measure by measure, with insignificant variations.” – Arthur Schopenhau
ARTIST STATEMENT
Mediocre is a series of expositions, actions, murals, and various types of intervention, each one a complementary part of the whole, while keeping its individual reading. From an analytic and existentialist standpoint, Mediocre exposes different aspects of the everyday—the day-to-day of the people that make up an intrahistory, the history of those who don’t appear in textbooks, those who go undocumented and form a part of the enormous group we call the people.
It examines various themes, seeking out the extremes that emerge in distinct cultures and contexts. It is possible to separate these extremes into three categories: the positive, the negative, and the neutral. The positive refers to pleasure and beauty, the negative to violence, death, and tragedy, and the neutral (also considered an extreme) is the absence of both. These concepts are equivocal: from cynical, nihilist or pessimist, to vitalist or even romantic, these interpretations can change depending on the observer.
Mediocre in Ottawa will present a selection of works and a workshop. The exact images and themes of the selected works were chosen at random, yet fall into the Mediocre concept. The workshop will be comprised of people in the city from different backgrounds (homeless, addicts, housewives, and working class people, to name a few) interpreting the theme through their own paintings. These works will also be exposed and put up for sale in the Mediocre show at Le Petite Mort Gallery.
THE ARTIST:
Alejandro Hugo Dorda Mevs, also known as Axel Void, was born in Miami in 1986 to a Spanish father and Haitian mother. The hectic, unstable and ever-changing atmosphere in which Alex was raised, influenced his way of understanding things along with his way of representing them.
At 3 years old Alex went to live in Cadiz with his mother, where he had to get used to living in several places for short periods of time.
When Alex was 10 years old, his Haitian grandfather came home with a saxophone for him that he bought for nine dollars. This is where his passion for music began. A few years later this passion was accompanied by his career as a painter. Along with the saxophone Alex plays the sideflute, clarinet and piano. He has also played and recorded with various jazz, funk-rock, electronic, rap and experimental music groups and bands.
Alex began to teach himself to paint at very young age. In 1999 he was introduced to the graffiti world, which influenced his forms of expression as well as the conception of his work taking a parallel path with the commercial world of contemporary art.
At 16 Alex’s mother returned to Miami, and Alex decided to stay in Cadiz and maintained a kind of nomadic and solitary lifestyle. Afterwards, he lived between Granada, and Sevilla, where he still lives, maintaining the rhythm of frequent travel, painting, and music.
Alex’s pseudonym comes from the compostion of his work: the juxtaposition of form and emptiness, silence and sound, and Void’s way of combining and confusing empty space with closed space.
Alex has always lived in environments where drugs were present, which in combination with experiences suffered in his family, brought about in Alex a rejection of substances and “pseudo life”. This rejection and his concept of “Home” are two of the most recurring themes in Void’s work. It can be said, however, that its not so much these themes that call attention, so much as the dynamism of his work–ambiguity, discomfort, unease, are some of the most fundamental features of Alex’s work, which mores than give any clearcut messages, his work clouds them, raising more questions and doubt than answers. – J. Carmona
MORE:
Mediocre at Banksy’s “Dismaland”
Weston Super Mare, England.
This mural is part of Banksy’s theme park “Dismaland”. This space used to be a water park called Tropicana. It was the towns main attraction, it had a cheesy, tropical design to it with Victorian architecture. It is built right on the beach, given that this beach isn’t ideal because of its brown muddy tone the water park was a good alternative.
Weston Super Mare, even though is one of the number one vacation sites, has a very bizarre feel to it. You can find bright loud attractions, arcades, fish and chips, plastic beach toys, old people that are afraid of flying to a better place, karaoke bars, a very prolific Elvis impersonator, and a large amount of drug addicts that were brought to town from other places in order to go through rehab but ended up bringing the drug dealers as well, following their best clientele.
This wall is part of the Mediocre series. A satire and homage to mundanity and our every day life. It is situated on the inside facade of the main building. Fitting the concept of Dismaland that, to me, is a very clever parody and a critic of art and our society.