I woke him up... it was already 2pm so I didn’t feel too guilty. What is it with artists who always work at night until the younger hours of the new dawn? Alexöne drops me his key in a box from the window of his flat...There he is in the doorway, obstructing the light that glows in the background, his silhouette’s fuzzy, but it’s big.

 
We walk through the narrow hallway that leads to his sanctuary... It’s packed with canvases of all sizes, half-started, half-finished, Alex glides through them with ease... I knock down a couple. Stepping inside his creative layer... I freeze. I don’t know where to take my next step! paintings, pots, brushes, pigments, drawings and unfinished business seem to all stop at once and turn around to have a look at the ‘new guy’... me.

His voice pulls me out of this strange world I just walked into... It isn’t deep and growly as I expected it to be... no its lively and warm:

-‘Have a seat!’

-‘Ok... But where?!’
 

He shuffles and stirs and seconds later there’s a bright clean spot of couch inviting my ass to sit down, right between a pile of comicbooks and a couple of unfinished drawings. In a dash he’s accross the room and puts on a CD...how does he do it? He’s like an owl in flight, not a sound... you barely see him move around. It’s quite understandable, the guy’s quite big, and the room quite small... But then it hits me... On the table in front of me: A hoard of weird animals marching through a warzone... and I see them, the penguins. That’s it, Alex isn’t an owl he’s a penguin... A lazer-beamed killer penguin.
 

Again his voice snaps me out of my transe while my eyes keep staring at the painting.

- ‘It’s a piece I’m doing for Dave Kinsey’s gallery in LA’

A lyrical scene depicting a surprising army of deceitful elephants, masked horses, lazer-eyed penguins and undescribable dragon-dogs on 8 pieces of canvas.... It seems like Alex is crossing the Alps with his troops of exotic animals.

His style of painting is strongly inspired by his love of comic books and the broad experience gained back when he was a graffiti artist under the alias Oedipe. His love of words and images explodes on the canvas and you  immediately feel compelled to enter this weird but fun new world. There’s a strong connection to 16^th century Ottoman paintings... you see battle scenes and exotic places, lyrical messages of honorable Ottoman values. That’s it... Creating poetical sceneries with infinite ease... Alex is like a a lazer-beamed-killer-penguin of a painter working for an estranged and crazy Sultan.

 Alex has a passion for detail. As opposed to the rougher ways of graffiti, the illustrative paintings of Alexöne are a world of little details, often humourous but never superfluous. Alex is like a craftsman, he makes his own colors using an endless supply of pigments, he mixes pencil, pen, paint and bomb in his paintings, layers that add depth to his world. Often depicting scenes of absurd and absolute chaos, his paintings are subtly balanced between colour and space, texture and void.

 
Alex has been living in Belgium for the past three years. Belgian cops being what they are, Alex quit graffiti and started painting. Having assimilated his experience in graffiti-writing to his illustrative painting, he’s developed a unique touch that has been valued and recognized accross the world. He is currently working on a book summing up his last three years of his little ‘Expérience Belge’.