Sr.X's Pork Loin Roast serves up a tasty treat in the BSMT Space gallery in Dalston • Inspiring City

Spanish artist Sr. X has been a regular on the streets of London for the past few years. His art, a mixture of 50’s pop culture imagery often with a fair bit of abstraction thrown in. His name, often misunderstood in the English language stands for Senor, he is Senor X or Sr.X for short.

His art will often turn these images on its head and that is what he has served up at his latest show in Dalston’s popular BSMT Space. Many of those 50’s images are recreated here, happy on the outside, their perfect lives apparent for all to see, except that’s not quite right.

His work plays on those iconic images, his sense of humour, sharp. His work is a combination of transfer, stencil and freehand. It makes for some compelling and multi layered imagery. It’s also a play on the modern day world, one in which we place our happy selves onto social media sites such as facebook and instagram. Always presenting a smiling outward appearance we do it all the time despite what we might have going on inside.

Abstraction is another key element of Sr.X’s work. It’s a technique he’s played around with on the street a number of times. Again the same style of 50’s imagery but this time these happy characters are interacting with something outworldy, something which is hard to describe. A smoke, a smog, a cloud, a willow the wisp? Who knows what it is, even Sr.X isn’t sure and I’m not that it even matters that much anyway.

Pork Loin Roast is a name taken from one of the main images in the show. An old advert, today it might be called a ghost sign, hides behind the image of a smiling couple, one holding a coke bottle with a rag sticking out,the other with a lighter. Both the protagonists have a twinkle in their eye.

For BSMT Space this show represents another coup. Its shows this year have included solo’s from some of the urban art scene’s biggest names. Sr.X is another of these names and to be fair it’s about time, his work deserves a bigger audience and we’ll be looking forward to a lot more from Sr.X in the months and years to come.

Pork Loin Roast from Sr.X runs at Dalston’s BSMT Space gallery from 1 September 2016 to 11 September 2016. The gallery is free and open 12-7 daily.