Painting as a prayer. Signs of recognition, recognition of the mystery. I don’t know what it is but I recognize there is. With time, painting and life will slowly reveal glimpses of it, that’s my faith.

I aim for the disposition to receive the mystery, not to seek to reveal it.

(Alejandro Sintura)

We are delighted to announce Alejandro Sintura’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. In Between hidden and almost revealed a series of new paintings are presented.

The exhibition’s title is taken from Brazilian author Clarice Lispector’s posthumous novel A breath of life (1978), which has been important to the artist during the working process. In an attempt to put into words an almost unbearable beauty, she describes it as something ”Between the hidden and the almost revealed. It’s also a shimmering desperation and the pain gets confused with beauty and mixed with an apocalyptic joy.” In a similar vein, Alejandro Sintura speaks of his paintings—as an attempt to unite form, material, and subject in order to bring something elusive and hard to grasp to light.

Alejandro Sintura’s new paintings can be described as balancing between narrative and materiality. The group of works on view in the exhibition shows great variety, both in how they are painted and in the choice of subjects. Every addition to the painting’s surface is full of intention and an attempt at communication. Some works have heavy body paint, thick impasto over thick surfaces, and others are light, faint, thin where the raw colour of the canvas shines through.

The paintings are figurative but also fragmentary and, at times, almost merely hinted at. A narrative is perhaps more a sense of narrative. They depict not only a memory but also the inability to remember. A tender scene portrays not only closeness but also desperation and distance. Within the beautiful and serene lies a brooding eeriness. Each painting forms its own world, independent and self-contained, like in a collection of short stories. All works are equally important, regardless of size and content. Every painting act contains the potential of giving a soul to an object, and every object contains the potential of being given a soul.

These paintings came from a moment of change in my life, during my first year living away from Bogotá. My subjects are the same, my surroundings and what I feel close to me. But there’s a distance in time from the subjects, most of the paintings depict people, living beings or places that I saw a long time ago and I’m using paint to recall them back. They’re reminiscences, very rooted in memories, the people depicted are friends and family. It’s definitely a way of building a familiar environment for myself in the space of the studio. But there are mixed feelings around these subjects and spaces, it’s in a way nostalgic, they feel both eerie and tender at the same time to me. I long for mystery, for doubt and uncertainty, as well as tenderness, innocence and beauty, I want them to coexist. I wish for my paintings to exist within the gaps of these ideas.

(Alejandro Sintura)