The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes

Photos courtesy of Josee Nadeau.  Images (c) Alan Aldridge Inc.

If you were to have looked up the word 'surreal' in the dictionary between the hours of 7pm and 10pm last night (PST) you might have found to your astonishment that as you opened the page, multicolored flowers grew before your eyes, little talking fish swam across the paper, onto the back of your hand and became tatooed onto your arm whilst the words melted into a forrest of color, populated by the most weird and wonderful characters - at once completely strange, yet still unnervingly familiar.  This was because The King Of Psychedelia, the legendary Alan Aldridge opened the doors of his exhibition -  Tripping The Art Fantastic at Mr MusicHead on Sunset Blvd.

Okay, so that might not have happened to everyone.  Okay, it might not have happened at all, but seeing this show last night made me want to believe that things like that could happen...

Alan Aldridge makes me want to believe in magic.  There! I said it.

It was also surreal because Aldridge, who held the most popular art show of the year in London during last year (over 50,000 visitors to his exhibition at The Design Museum) chose such a small place for his first LA show of original work.  It transpires that Sam (owner of Mr MusicHead) is a dear friend of Alan's.  Ah! Nepotism lives!   They proved to be wonderful hosts though, presenting not only the artwork, but also the video installation intelligently and lovingly.  The place got crowded and stayed that way from the time the doors opened at 7pm to the time they closed (10pm).  

L-R - Alan Aldridge and fellow artist Josee Nadeau.

The line of people waiting to get their signed copies of The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes - Alan's latest retrospective book looking at his extraordinary career, also stayed long throughout the night, until the last book was signed (for the security guard, more about him later) at 10.20pm.

Art show openings are funny things aren't they?  Sometimes you go because you know the artist, or your friends are going, or you know the gallery owner, or because it's free drinks or because you think someone famous might be there, and I suspect that last night, a lot of people went for a lot of those reasons.  The really funny thing about this show is that I've rarely seen, as weird as this sounds, so many people spend so much time looking at the art.  Everyone who walked into the room was immediately, and without any sense of  duty, sucked into the first picture that they saw.  And there they stood, each one slipping quietly into an artistically induced altered-state.  

'It's like taking acid' said one bright and rather lovely young lady who had been invited by one of the editors from Vanity Fair.  'Once you've committed to it, there is nothing you can do but go with it.  That's almost what this feels like'.  

She's right.  The detail that needs to be taken in, the journeys that your eyes have to go on to fully appreciate the extraordinary worlds that Aldridge creates, are so wondrous and plentiful in each piece, that you find you can't look away, and that you are taken to a place where nothing is quite right, but where everything is absolutely beautiful non-the less.  

Even the security guard was lost in one of Aldridge's images.  Someone could have stolen his shoes and he wouldn't have noticed.  No-one did of course.  Once through the doors we were all transported into Aldridge's mind... A place where there was no crime, (and judging by book and print sales - no recession) and where John Lennon (the, um, blue version of John walking down steps in his own brain) was alive and well and telling us that all we needed was love, whilst Elton John rode a piano like a bucking bronco.

I glanced across the room and saw Luis Barajas (owner of Flaunt Magazine) standing quietly on his own, studying an image from The Butterfly Ball.  He was silent and still, almost serene.  Now that really is magic.

Tripping The Art Fantastic @ Mr MusicHead, 7511 W.Sunset Blvd, Hollywood, CA, 90046. April 29th - May 13th.  www.mrmusichead.com

The new book - The Man With Kaleidoscope Eyes is available at Borders and all good bookstores and at www.alanaldridge.net

See the four page feature on Aldridge in the next issue of Flaunt Magazine

No Such Agency would like to thank Greg @ Fiji Water and all the other sponsors for their support.