Are the birds gonna eat us, Mommy (The Birds, 1963, Alfred Hitchcock)
Courtesy of Alejandro Javaloyas
UN CUCHILLO QUE NO CORTA
In dialogue with Alejandro Javaloyas
In conversation with Alejandro Javaloyas
FVTVRIST Magazine // Interview by Elina P.
September 2026 / Issue 5
Fvtvrist met Alejandro Javaloyas following Un cuchillo que no corta at Galería Reus in Palma, and ahead of his solo exhibition opening 18 December at Sa Refinadora, the public gallery in Marratxí.
Un cuchillo que no corta was initiated in a notebook he kept by his bed. For years he has written down his recurrent nightmares in it, a few words each time, enough to hold an image before it fades away. Later, the work grew out of those notes into something closer to a private mythology, with its own recurring figures, its own symbols, its own cycles of growth and decay. Each work in the series functions as a narrow window onto a shared field of anxiety, built around inevitability, passage and the cruelty of time. The method is closer to editing than to drawing. A dream appears first as an intense mental image, then fades to a few written words. To recover what was lost, he works from his own photographs, from AI-generated imagery, from images found online and in historical archives. These are cropped and altered until they function as photographic references, then translated slowly through airbrushing in ink and coloured pencil.
That way of working comes from somewhere specific. Javaloyas trained in drawing and painting from the age of six, under three painters in Mallorca: Ernest, Malena Tous, and Antonia Oliver. An education built entirely around technique. He then spent six years studying film directing at ESCAC in Barcelona, graduating twice with honours, before returning to painting a decade later. The cinema is still visible in the work: in the cropping, in what sits outside the frame, in the sense of a sequence that never arrives.
Alejandro Javaloyas
© Courtesy of the artist.
You trained in painting from the age of six, then studied film directing for six years, then came back to painting. What made you go to film, and what brought you back? What stayed with you from both worlds?
I started drawing and painting very young, around the age of six, and I was lucky to receive a very rigorous academic training with three painters in Mallorca: Ernest, Malena Tous, and Antonia Oliver. It was an education built around technique. Excellence really mattered. I’m incredibly grateful for that foundation, but there was almost no conversation about content, ideas, or what a painting could actually be about. And the professional painters I knew in that local context were mostly landscape or portrait painters, which simply didn’t interest me very much.
At the same time, I was doing classical dance and piano, I was obsessed with cooking, and I had this enormous fascination with movies. My mother gave me a membership to VideoArt, a videoclub next to our apartment that had an amazing collection of cinéma d’auteur. I would rent a DVD almost every day and watch it alone at night. I was choosing very strange things for my age. I remember being twelve, thirteen, fourteen and getting incredibly excited about films like In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, or Elephant when they came out on DVD.
Cinema felt infinitely more permissive than the painting world I knew. It could be narrative, abstract, psychological, dreamlike, violent, intimate, philosophical—all at once. It seemed limitless. I think that freedom was what I was craving, so by high school I was completely convinced that I wanted to go to film school.
Once I got there, the influence of painting became obvious very quickly. I already had a very precise sense of framing, light, and color. I knew how I wanted things to look before I really understood how stories worked. In fact, probably too much in the beginning: I was very concerned with images at a time when I still knew almost nothing about narrative.
During those years I stopped painting completely, but I missed it. As soon as I had enough money and enough space to work, I came back to it. The difference was that I returned with a completely different mindset. I no longer saw painting primarily as a demonstration of skill.
Film had taught me to think in terms of experience, tension, rhythm, ambiguity, and especially atmosphere.
That is probably what stayed with me most. Classical filmmaking is often explained through structure and conflict: a character wants something, encounters obstacles, and moves toward some form of resolution. But the filmmakers I loved most—Antonioni, Lynch, Béla Tarr, Tarkovsky, Lars von Trier, Roy Andersson, Bergman, Haneke—were often interested in something more dissolved. Their films could suspend narrative and build a world through mood, silence, duration, unease. They created this thick, almost physical atmosphere where reality felt slightly displaced.
That sense of eeriness or uncanniness is still what I look for in painting today. I want an image to feel familiar but somehow delusional, as if something has just happened outside the frame, or is about to happen. Painting gave me the eye; cinema gave me the atmosphere.
That sense of eeriness or uncanniness is still what I look for in painting today. I want an image to feel familiar but somehow delusional, as if something has just happened outside the frame, or is about to happen. Painting gave me the eye; cinema gave me the atmosphere.
© Courtesy of the artist.
How do you approach narrative? Your compositions are heavily cropped, and there's often a sense of something happening outside the frame, how far does the story extend beyond the borders of the work?
My current body of work is clearly narrative in origin, because the paintings are visual reconstructions of nightmares that I first wrote down. But even if they begin with something quite specific, I never want the resulting image to feel resolved.
Ian McKeever once said, “I think good paintings don’t give you an answer. They should block you off, seduce you, pull you in, and then push you out again. A painting that tells you everything has lost it, it’s revealed itself, and it’s gone.” I relate very strongly to that idea. I want the painting to remain open, to resist becoming too legible.
One way I’ve been pushing that ambiguity is through increasingly close, narrow, almost suffocating framings. It started as something instinctive, but I became very aware of it and began using it consciously. Over the last two years, the images have become tighter and tighter, to the point where I imposed a rule on myself: I never paint anything smaller than life-size, or even exactly 1:1. It always has to be larger.
That constraint completely changes what can fit inside the frame. On a small painting, say 30 by 25 centimeters, perhaps only a mouth and a nose can appear, or a single eye. The full face simply cannot fit.
For me, that creates tension in very unexpected ways. It also forces the viewer to imagine everything that continues beyond the borders of the canvas. The image becomes incomplete by design. You are given fragments, clues, perhaps the residue of an event, but not the whole situation.
That is where narrative becomes interesting to me: when the painting stops functioning as an answer and starts functioning as a question.
© Courtesy of the artist.
You have several different bodies of work: figurative drawings, expanded paintings, installations, video, photography... Do they talk to each other, or do you keep them separate?
Yes, absolutely. I see myself as a multidisciplinary artist, and for me the medium usually comes from the project itself. I don’t begin with a fixed visual language that I simply repeat from one body of work to the next. I begin with an idea, and then I ask what form can carry it best. Sometimes that becomes video, photography, installation, expanded painting, or figurative drawing. I also sing and write, so moving between languages feels very natural to me.
Sometimes the change in register is quite abrupt, and sometimes it happens more gradually. But I do think the projects speak to each other because, inevitably, they are made by the same mind and the same hands.
There are recurring concerns: the inexorability of time, aging, decay, death, and the different ways we respond to those fears through ritual, religion, magical thinking, or superstition. Visually, there are also common traits—clean, restrained compositions, muted palettes, and a certain sobriety.
And perhaps most consistently, there is this attraction to moodiness, to that space Eugenio Trías describes in Lo bello y lo siniestro: the border where beauty begins to become unsettling, uncanny. That tension between attraction and unease is something I keep returning to, regardless of the medium.
Un cuchillo que no corta. The title means a knife that doesn't cut. Where did it come from?
Un cuchillo que no corta is actually the title of a poem I wrote long before I started this body of work. The poem also came from a nightmare, and it is structured almost like an inventory of things that have lost the function that defines them: a knife that doesn’t cut, an eclipse that doesn’t obscure, a gun that doesn’t kill, a key that doesn’t open, a medicine that doesn’t cure.
It begins with very concrete, almost domestic objects, but gradually moves outward and becomes more existential and spiritual. Toward the end, the language shifts into religion: the Virgin who doesn’t ascend, in a church that doesn’t gather; the angel who doesn’t announce; a miracle that doesn’t happen.
And then it ends with the line: El alma que no es eterna — the soul that isn’t eternal.
For me, that final line is really where the poem is heading. It is about death, and about the possibility that the things we rely on to give meaning, protection, continuity, or transcendence might fail us. At the same time, the line almost works through negation. By imagining a soul that is not eternal, I am also revealing how much I want, or perhaps need, to believe that it is. It isn’t a certainty for me. It is closer to a hope.
When I first started developing the series, some works were quite directly connected to specific verses in the poem. But very quickly the imagery and the internal cosmology of the project expanded far beyond it.
Still, the poem remained the seed of the whole body of work. When I eventually exhibited the series, I had the complete poem installed in vinyl on the wall at the entrance, almost as a threshold into the world of the show.
© Courtesy of the artist.
By imagining a soul that is not eternal, I am also revealing how much I want, or perhaps need, to believe that it is. It isn’t a certainty for me. It is closer to a hope.
© Courtesy of the artist.
The series started with nightmares you wrote down in a notebook by your bed. When did those private notes start becoming work? What is your relation to dreams?
I’ve had recurrent nightmares since I was a kid, and for years I’ve had the habit of writing things down when I wake up. Not necessarily the whole dream or a complete narrative, but fragments: an image, a sentence, a color, a smell, a situation. Sometimes just a few words that seem incredibly important at four in the morning and completely incomprehensible the next day.
A few years ago, after writing the poem Un cuchillo que no corta, I went back to some of those notebooks and started wondering whether I could do something with them visually. Initially, I thought perhaps I could simply illustrate the notes. But when I reread them, I realized how vague they actually were. There had been this enormous loss of information in the translation from dream to language. A dream can be incredibly precise when you are inside it, but they are incredibly ephemeral and ethereal, and we forget them quickly.
Around that time, prompt-to-image AI models were becoming accessible, and I became interested in using them to reverse that translation process. There was something conceptually appealing about completing this circle: image (the dream) to text (the note and then the prompt), and back into image (through an AI-generated photograph).
Most of the results were terrible. But occasionally something appeared that was visually or atmospherically interesting, even if it had very little to do with what I originally dreamed. I would then heavily edit, crop, combine, and manipulate those images before using them as references for colored-pencil drawings. For me, drawing them by hand was important. It brought a human, physical layer back into a process that had partly been externalized, and it allowed me to internalize the image again through labor and time.
As the series developed, I eventually outgrew that initial constraint. The work is still rooted in my nightmares, but now the visual archive is much broader: historical photographs, images found online, film stills, family photographs, and pictures I take myself.
My relationship with dreams is quite conflicted because they are almost always unpleasant. Sometimes a nightmare genuinely affects my mood for the rest of the day. I assume they echo anxieties or fears from my waking life, but I’m not particularly interested in decoding them psychologically. I’m more interested in the strange images they leave behind, and in what happens when those images survive all these different translations.
© Courtesy of the artist.
One piece takes its title from Hitchcock's The Birds and its source image from a photograph by Edgar Martins. We are surrounded by other people's images now, endlessly reproduced and detached from where they came from. How do you think about using them? Is it a tribute, a part of your own archive?
We are surrounded by trillions of images, and whether we realize it or not, they are constantly informing our tastes and reshaping the way we see, think, judge, and understand the world. In my case, I probably enjoy consuming art even more than making it. I’m a voracious consumer of movies, exhibitions, art books, photography, music. I’ve been like that for more than thirty years, and I’m still surprised almost every week by something that makes me think, “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that,” or, “It would never have occurred to me to look at it that way.” I find that incredibly exciting.
So I don’t really believe that art-making happens in isolation. We are always responding to things we have previously seen, heard, read, or experienced. Nicolas Bourriaud wrote about this in Postproduction, looking at how contemporary artists increasingly work with cultural forms that are already in circulation—reusing, interpreting, and repositioning existing material rather than imagining creation as something that begins from zero. In the age of Instagram and endless image circulation, that feels even more evident.
Because of that, I’m quite skeptical about rigid ideas of authorship and originality. It can be very difficult to determine where something “of your own” begins and where everything you have absorbed over a lifetime ends.
Jonathan Monk once said that artists use materials, and that whether that material is already an artwork or comes out of a tube of paint, you work with what is available and try to transform it into something you can call your own. I strongly relate to that.
For me, an image that already exists can become material. I’m comfortable using it as long as there is substantial transformation, so that the source is not simply reproduced as the final work, and as long as I’m transparent about where it comes from and credit it when appropriate.
In fact, making those references traceable is important to me. Opening my archive of sources to the public—Edgar Martins, Hitchcock, a family photograph, an anonymous internet image—is also a way of opening my own visual universe. It allows the viewer to see the network of images behind the work and, perhaps, to understand the painting not as an isolated object, but as part of a much larger conversation.
© Courtesy of the artist.
Could you tell us about your upcoming project?
The most immediate project is a solo show opening on December 18 at Sa Refinadora, a public gallery in Marratxí, Spain, titled Now It’s Time for Monsters. It continues the universe of Un cuchillo que no corta, but introduces a slightly more political dimension.
The title comes from the famous phrase commonly associated with Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” It’s actually a loose paraphrase of a passage from his Prison Notebooks, rather than a literal quotation, but I’m very drawn to that image of the “monster” as something that emerges during periods of transition, when an old order is collapsing but whatever comes next hasn’t yet taken shape.
That feels particularly relevant to the moment we’re living through. The work is still very much connected to dreams, fear, superstition, religion, and magical thinking, but some of those anxieties are beginning to move from the private and psychological into the collective and political.
I also have an online feature with Studio Veive coming in January 2027, followed by a solo show in London with Twilight Contemporary in March 2027. So right now I’m spending a lot of time in the studio, trying to bring all these different threads together and have the new work ready.
© Courtesy of the artist.
© Courtesy of the artist.
Is there something you've wanted to make and haven't been able to yet?
Absolutely. There are millions of things I want to make and haven’t made yet. I’m a very curious person, and I’m especially excited by projects that force me into unfamiliar territory. I really enjoy that feeling of not fully knowing how to do something yet, and then having to learn enough—technically, conceptually, practically—to make it possible.
The list is very long, but probably at the top there are two things: a feature film and a folk album.
Film is obviously still very present in the way I think, even though I haven’t worked in filmmaking for years. I would love to return to it at some point with the perspective I have now, after having spent so much time developing my visual practice in other directions.
And music is another language I feel very close to. I sing, I write, and I’m fascinated by how directly a song can create emotion with very little.
Knowing myself, both projects would probably end up inhabiting a similar emotional territory: very atmospheric, very moody, and devastatingly melancholic. That seems to be a place I keep returning to, regardless of the medium.
In the studio of the Alejandro Javaloyas
© Courtesy of the artist.
About Alejandro Javaloyas
Alejandro Javaloyas (b. 1987, Palma de Mallorca, Spain) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in Toulouse, France. From the age of six to eighteen, he received extensive academic training in drawing and painting under Majorcan classical painters Ernest, Malena Tous, and Antònia Oliver. He later pursued filmmaking, earning both a BA and an MA (Summa Cum Laude) from the ESCAC Barcelona Film School at the University of Barcelona. In 2022, he further developed his painting practice through the Turps Correspondence Mentorship Course at Turps Art School in London, UK.
In recent years, Javaloyas has focused primarily on figurative drawings, paintings, and colored photographs that inhabit the threshold between beauty and the uncanny. Working mainly with colored pencil, oil, airbrush, and pastel, he creates hazy, blurred, and atmospheric images whose delicate surfaces are often charged with a latent sense of unease. Much of this recent work emerges from recurrent nightmares and from the fragmentary images that remain after waking, forming the basis of his ongoing body of work Un cuchillo que no corta. Through intimate depictions of bodies, objects, domestic scenes, and religious or cinematic motifs, Javaloyas constructs a personal symbolic universe shaped by a persistent concern with the inexorability of time, aging and decay, the fear of death, and the human impulse to seek meaning in what cannot be fully understood.
Javaloyas has exhibited his work in notable exhibitions, including Un cuchillo que no corta, a solo show curated by Sofia Moisés at Galería Reus, Palma, Spain (2026). He has also presented his work at art fairs, including CAN Ibiza with Galería Reus, Ibiza, Spain (2026), ARCO Lisboa with LA BIBI + REUS, Lisbon, Portugal (2025), and UVNT Art Fair with STAIN Projects, Madrid, Spain (2025). He was a finalist at the Premi Ciutat de Palma Antoni Gelabert d’Arts Visuals (2024) and received the 1st Prize at the XXXVIII Certamen de Pintura de Sant Marçal de Marratxí (2025).
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