An air-filled rectangular pointillism with motifs of hatchings and symbology borrowed from folk art and African patterning, his portrait subjects are immobile against a sky of repeated rains. The Italian-born, London-based painter self-named ALO (Aristide Loria) has been on the street art scene here for about a decade, and his style has remained his own.

He prefers non-permissioned walls and began with smaller, intimate portraits, but in recent years has copped to larger sized murals in this age of the public opus. With roots in European classicism and the painting tradition, he shies away from aerosol in favor of paint brushes. ALO also avoids the common traps of ironic pop art, photoreal fantasy, and other tropes of street art, preferring instead to attempt to talk about humans in stiffly representational folk terms, warmed by smart palette combinations. Now in his second solo show at BSMT, he is trying his hand at landscapes.

“Based on his ongoing research into mankind through portraiture, this new body of work will also feature larger scale canvases and paper works,” says the press release for ‘ELEVEN’, opening this September.

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