"My main interest is to reveal the layers of personalities that we bring imperceptibly."
Jordi Alós (b. 1993, Mexico City) is a Mexican-Spanish visual artist whose practice moves between figurative painting, street culture, and conceptual reflection on identity. He studied Advertising Design at the Institute of Marketing and Advertising in Mexico City, where he quickly recognised that the boundary between art and commercial image-making was both more porous and more charged than his education acknowledged. That tension - between institution and freedom, between what should be and what is - became the foundation of his artistic voice.
His work functions as a kind of narrative that begins in underground and street life, passes through a liberation of expression and being, and arrives at the conviction that we are all the sum of our shared and personal experiences. At the centre of his practice stands the figure of the Machango - a term from the Canary Islands used to describe a clown, a character, a puppet, and sometimes a fool. During his time on Tenerife, Alós became captivated by the word's richness and its near-total absence from visual culture. He set out to give it form from his own imagination: translating language into image, concept into painting. The Machangos are figures that exist simultaneously in the ritual, the fictional, the real, and the artistic.
His canvases are saturated with music - rock, punk, rap, funk, and electronic sounds resonate through the energy, style, and titles of his works. Mexican culture collides with global influences to produce a new kind of popular imagery: idiosyncratic, ironic, and raw. Technically, Alós situates his Machangos within the tradition of art brut (outsider art): paintings that emerge when the body takes over from reason, when a rebellious force finds expression in the freedom of the brushstroke.
Alós completed artist residencies in Beinwil am See, Switzerland (2018) and at Konvent Zero in Barcelona (2019). His work is held in private collections across Mexico, the United States, Europe, and Asia. He has exhibited at König Galerie (Mexico City), Black Gallery (Antwerp), Vroom and Varossieau (Amsterdam), The Lodge (Los Angeles), and at international art fairs including Art Miami and Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam. Between 2024 and 2026, his works travelled internationally as part of Magical Art World — Sesame Street x Coexist, shown in China, Singapore, South Korea, and Thailand.
For MPV Gallery, Alós presents recent work including the triptych 6 Underground, Everybody Everybody, and Fade Into You (2024) - three small oil paintings on panel, each conjuring an alter ego shaped by music, subculture, and the question of who truly lies behind a face. Created in 2024, these portraits form part of a pictorial exploration of the multiple facets of human identity and the ways in which the individual and the collective intertwine within contemporary culture. Influenced by punk, rock, and the subgenres that have shaped countercultural imaginaries, the works function as symbolic alter egos in which portraiture ceases to be a fixed representation and becomes a space of projection, irony, and transformation. Their titles - drawn from songs that have accompanied and influenced the artist's process - operate as narrative triggers that expand the reading of each figure, suggesting emotional states and shared memories. Through hairstyles, gestures, and exaggerated or fragmented features, the works ask how identity is constructed through cultural codes, inherited forms of rebellion, and the desire for belonging.
The large-scale works Amantes de Jade, Frijoles y Caviar, and High Speed (2026) reveal a more mythological dimension of his practice: baroque compositions, animal symbolism, and the friction between luxury and scarcity, motion and stillness. Together, these paintings propose a reflection on what we once were, what we conceal, and what we may yet become.