Maddox Gallery is excited to welcome American Contemporary artist Dan Alva for his first online solo show, Fortune Favours the Bold. From 22nd June, visitors to Maddoxgallery.com will be able to view the new collection of 10 large-scale paintings along with exclusive behind-the-scenes insight into Alva’s artistic process. This enthralling exhibition remasters the great masters, imprinting Alva’s signature graphic style on the art-historical canon by creating windows into his works that both conceal and reveal.
For the show, Alva uses camouflage, one of his signature motifs, to remix recognisable works of art, drawing the eye in two directions as the viewer questions what is being disclosed and what is being hidden. Suspended somewhere between the digital and the physical, his talent for transposing different genres - Vermeer’s 15th century Girl with a Pearl Earring and one of Damien Hirst’s Contemporary spin paintings, for example - is powered by technology. Before he even contemplates picking up a paintbrush, the artist painstakingly builds, manipulates and edits his works digitally to find the strongest compositions with the boldest visual impact.
Travelling back into art history but also moving forwards, Alva is part of a movement of artists who are creating the kind of transitional art in which the past and the future melt. Like the Pop Artist Andy Warhol, who transformed everyday imagery from the world of advertising into groundbreaking art, he takes iconic works of art that have become ingrained in the public consciousness and self-edits them in a way that has become iconic to him.
From the sketching of ideas to the layering of different tones, colours and shadows, designing a logo and painting a canvas are a very similar conceptual process for Alva as he slowly works towards the final image. He fell in love with the process of painting in his studio in Miami, where he often spends days studying an artist, digging deep into their lives, enabling him to feel the connection between past and present when painting.
Many of the patterns in Alva’s artworks are inspired by the world of fashion. Originally used for military purposes, he loves the fact that houses like Louis Vuitton and Valentino have taken camouflage, with its tough army image, and turned it into a fashion statement. With works like Clean Sneak - a remastered Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci - and Blow One Down a reworking of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ 17th century portrait of the Princesse de Broglie, Alva creates a similarly striking contrast - a dichotomy between classicism and abstraction where the camouflage leaves the mind to imagine what lies beneath it.
Like the title of the exhibition, “Fortune Favours the Bold”, all this is done with the knowing humour of someone who has grown up surrounded by art, design and fashion and isn’t afraid to put his own, unique spin on a serious masterpiece, sending a clear message that classical art can be playful, if you recontextualise it for a modern-day audience.
