Alex Dordoy: Winner Takes All

I first got to know Alex Dordoy as a student at The Glasgow School of Art. He was in the year below me and about to go on exchange to the same university in California I went to the previous year. Friendly, cheerful and too nice to ever come to anything, he wore a silly bobbled hat and a foppish curly fringe. It was clear he lacked the required edginess to ever make it in the art world. This is when I thought that every successful artist was cagey and elusive and art school where you went to cultivate your attitude.

Over three years have passed and I’m on a bus from London to Scotland reading the latest copy of Frieze magazine when I come upon a full page advert for Alex’s solo show at The Modern Institute, Glasgow. Soiling myself, I frantically text expletives to everyone I know in that mixture of excitement and jealousy that comes from finding, much to your ambivalent horror, that your peers are getting ahead in life.

I later insist on meeting up with him at the gallery for a chat and a sneak preview of the show. He’s still the friendly and enthusiastic guy I remember (minus the hat and fringe), and his work is similarly vibrant. Most of it lies around the floor in that transitional stage between studio and gallery. One huge painting in particular dominates the space. Lying on the floor, a sheet of blue tarpaulin is awash with abstract painterly marks from an indiscriminate, lively palette. Recognisable forms and figures loom out from the surface – a baguette, a bearded man in half profile.

The man, it turns out, is the American painter and film director, Julian Schnabel, best known for his large-scale portraits painted on canvases strewn with broken dinner plates. Along with Jasper Johns, Schnabel is a significant influence on Alex’s art. He describes to me a “lyrical quality” that underpins Schnabel’s otherwise bombastic work.

There’s something quite bombastic about Alex’s work too: the unashamed celebration of everything painterly, the combination of found objects and artistic gesture. I almost gasp when he tells me that he’s cast his own face in plaster and given it the Jackson Pollock treatment. He picks off the floor and gently holds in his hands a grubby, paint-streaked face. Sleeping and dead, endearing and morbid, he hangs it on the wall for us to have a better look – his very own death mask, filling the space with its weary melancholia.

In the middle of the room stands a metal shelving unit that looks like it’s been hit by a car. It’s the kind of unit you might have seen in the art department at high school, only this one’s been assaulted by a disruptive student. It embodies a certain tension, perhaps inherent in all the works, between the violence it implies and its ostensible elegance.

This very ambivalence, between the pathos of grim degradation and the optimism of an against-all-odds courageousness, seems to be reflected in the show’s title, Winner. The advert shows a rabbit-like creature with what can only be described as a feather headdress, stained with yellow and blue paint, holding a cable-tie. Is this poor creature what winning looks like?

The title, he explains, is named after a model of bicycle he used to own – a Raleigh Winner. The name appeared in some of his earlier paintings as a kind of motif and it just seemed natural to continue this pattern in the show’s title. “I wanted it to be provocative and bold,” he goes on, “but also to set up a situation that, like the bike, the work simply can’t live up to.”

I suddenly get an insight into the edgy artist beneath the jovial front. And despite his successes – gallery representation and solo shows – he seems acutely aware of the contingency of it all, that there is always an alternative, more grubby existence waiting in the wings.

But despite the underlying pessimism he’s getting on better than most of us lowly art graduates, especially seeing as he’s only 24. I ask him if he’s got any advice for current art students and he offers a suitably tongue-in-cheek answer. “As a wise man once said,” he begins a little mockingly, “there are three elements to success: talent, luck, and determination. Only the latter is in your hands, so work hard.”

It’s apparent that Alex has all three of these qualities in some abundance, and with a prestigious, two-year residency in Amsterdam coming up, it seems there is little getting in the way of his unending successes. And if his current trajectory is anything to go by, Alex’s future career can only be a testament to the winner taking all.