BARDO – ALO at BSMT Gallery

This autumn, Hackney‑based painter ALO (Aristide Loria) returns to BSMT with ‘BARDO’, a solo exhibition featuring 33 new original works created across 2024-2025. Known as the Urban Expressionist, ALO brings Fine Art into an urban context to make it accessible to a wider audience, revealing the human condition through pattern, line and quietly coded symbols. A sensitivity that focuses on the thresholds between studio and street, anonymity and presence.

Taking its title from the idea of a liminal passage, ‘BARDO’ dwells in moments that feel both immediate and timeless. Figures are caught in a quiet space in mid‑thought, city fragments and glimpses of the natural world edge into view so that each painting reads like a quiet encounter: intimate yet public, delicate yet insistent, personal yet archetypal.

Primarily a studio‑based painter, ALO’s hand is unmistakable. He works with brushes, paint and pens, eschewing spray cans -even in his outdoor interventions. The surfaces carry a tactility that is markedly un‑urban in technique but sit in such harmony with their environment that they feel like they have always been there. Vivid palettes, layered textures and distinctive linework continue to blur the boundaries between Street culture and Fine Art. Very few of ALO’s street pieces are painted with permission and he is not paid for these creations, maintaining his philosophy that public art should be free and accessible to all.