RAY CHARLES

“I recover the objects left behind by the consumer society to transfigure them. My credo: never do the same thing twice!!”

A.L.TONY was born in 1963, in Sabugal, Portugal. This small country then at the head of an immense wavering empire lives under the yoke of a dictatorship which pushes his parents into exile. Deprived of their presence, he still spends happy days in his native countryside with his grandmother, who lives in autarky.

A.L.TONY will keep from that time the sense of the value of things and the habit of recovering them. Retrospectively, he will conceive of it a critical spirit towards the consumer society, of which he condemns today the misdeeds for the future of humanity.

His schooling finished, he left for Brazil. Back in Europe, he joined a friend in Paris who had just co-founded Nukléart, a collective of artists bringing together Kim Prisu, Kriki and Étherno. He meets VR, Marie Rouffet, Epsylon Point, Miss-Tic, and hangs out with first wave graffiti artists. At the end of the 1980s, A.L.TONY placed his first street works on the walls of the capital.

In the spirit of the original Parisian stencil, A.L.TONY creates his images using a single matrix. His technical mastery allows him to give astonishing depth to a two-dimensional image using a single color, black or white.

His inspirations: music, without which life would have no meaning, and cinema.