Jordi Alós

About the exhibition 
Vroom & Varossieau is pleased to present Machangos, showcasing new works by 
Mexican artist Jordi Alós marking the artist’s first solo show in Europe. 
The exhibition features large-sized paintings depicting habits, daily life scenes 
and street performers in a playful, humorous and visually brilliant composition; 
and a new series of colourful and vibrant Machangos portraits. 
The word Machangos has been strongly used in the Canary Islands to define, in a 
funny although disqualifying tone, someone as an eccentric person or a clown. 
Hence Jordi adopted this peculiar word. They came to life in 2015, he picked up 
this series recently again and since then Machangos are gaining even more 
strength. The artist often combines their features with real-life subjects, creating 
a unique world of his own that is a paradox: at once cheerful and irritating, 
simultaneously familiar and strange. 
Shaped by a vigorous and energetic gesture, Alòs’ colourful and naive characters 
maintain an element of likeable ambiguity, encouraging viewers to question 
whether or not to trust their enigmatic and sly smiles. About his practice, the 
artist has recently stated: “l am strongly interested in revealing different layers 
of the same personality, often inaudibly. Through my work, I try to make this 
condition visible, with the aim of rethinking contemporary coexistence”. 
With references to both art brut and realism, Alós’ work focuses on the human 
being, his nature and social life. In this exhibition the artist invites us to a 
colourful and multilayered world in which he explores the connection between 
humans and the environment, daily-life scenarios, a mixture of fiction and reality, 
in a way in which he wants to question and rethink our relationship with the 
other and our surroundings. 
About the artist 
Jordi Alós (1993, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. 
He has exhibited his work as part of group shows in London, Los Angeles, Hong 
Kong, Mexico City. The solo exhibition Machangos with Vroom & Varossieau 
gallery marks the debut show of Jordi Alós in Europe. 
Alós studied advertising and design at the Institute of Marketing and Advertising 
in Mexico City, where he discovered that the limits of "what can be" and "has to 
be" gave space for human expression. His work is influenced from both realism 
and art brut. Alós himself refers to his practice as art brut, a term used to 
catalog the works that go beyond the epistemological plat-form of modernity. He 
gashes the bubble of reality with gestural brushstrokes, using acid colours to 
depict his cartoonish personas with big eyes. 
Drawing inspiration from his own surroundings, movies, music and his personal 
life, Alós investigates the contemporary society with its symbols, conflicts and 
tragicomic habits. Works of Jordi are in private collections in Dubai, Holland, 
USA, UK, Mexico, Spain and Switzerland.