Alejandra Freymann, a nomadic landscape

Santander,

Her work consists of apparently serene landscapes populated by characters or animals that suggest, above all, tenderness. Nothing visible threatens them, but if we look at her paintings more slowly we will detect instability, latent danger, a restlessness that can be difficult to define. The planes in which Alejandra Freymann works are articulated on surfaces of powerful colors that can merge with each other without losing their independence, precarious, as much as the supposed rationality of the figurative or the purity of the abstract, both styles summoned, to a greater or lesser extent, by this artist born in 1983 in the Mexican town of Xalapa and trained at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca.

Freymann paints enigmatic narratives in oil, stories with an indefinite beginning and end that sometimes draw on Mexican magical realism and, on other occasions, dreamlike landscapes. Despite the fragility and unreal air that his scenes convey, he also incorporates humor, emotional charge and a certain optimism, references to the symbolic power of nature or to very diverse authors, from Giotto to David Lynch, passing through René Magritte or Marcel Dzama.

Another key point in his works, which he often accompanies with poems, is the powerful presence of emptiness, understood from an optimistic, positive perspective, as a space that predisposes the characters to action, to the beginning of new and interesting endeavors. They allude to the best side of solitude, of crises. At other times he has delved deeper into the links between his plastic creations and words, establishing bridges between his narrative images and a cast of signs: each element in some of his paintings can be interpreted as a painted word, or as a cryptic poem, giving rise to a dialogue between what is told and the way of telling it.

Alejandra Freymann. Undoing a path, 2024

Until August 4, the Siboney Gallery in Santander presents Freymann’s second solo exhibition: “Paradisaea. Variations on the landscape, the mountain, the transitory and the idea of a garden”; there have been more occasions, in any case, to see his work in that city, given that he has participated twice in the Artesantander fair (one of them with Juan Zamora, with whom he once composed the duo The Children Pox) and also exhibited at its Museum of Fine Arts within the framework of the program The bridge of visionas early as 2011.

The pieces that await us in Siboney date back to the last year and fundamentally propose a reflection on the visible and the invisible in painting, understanding the former as the systems that, in a rational way, structure space and time in the field of representation, in order to provide unity to the visual field that meets us, and the latter as the perceptive processes that affect the viewer’s gaze, in no case as spirits or absences.

Alejandra Freymann. Sterna Paradisaea, 2024

In these works, there is again a narrative, but the figures are few and are placed against luminous backgrounds in which the materiality of what is represented is questioned: the stones become liquid, the clouds solidify, the surfaces can be earthy or specular… and the connections between one part of the composition and another will possibly be brief, ephemeral superpositions like ice. Of course, as the artist herself describes, these places lack a precise location, they do not respond to the recreation of reality but to that of ideas: The garden, as a painting, is an idea of a landscape that belongs only to the mind. It does not refer to any country and its limits are those of the observer’s fictitious contract. The idea of a nomadic landscape without a model.

The Arctic tern, Sterna paradisaea, flies approximately 2.4 million km in its lifetime. 3 round trips to the moon. It travels around the planet from pole to pole every year. Its landscape is the sea, the rocks, the islands, the sun.

The landscapes in this exhibition are not places, they are ideas. Fragments of mountains, seas, roads, islands where Arctic terns stop, fields where crows live, or gardens where visitors disappear. Empty paradises where the eyes sleep a dream of a bird without words.