GALERIA REUS


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Galería Reus is a contemporary art gallery based in Mallorca whose trajectory dates back to 2003. Over the years, the project has evolved through different forms of collaboration and programming, consolidating itself as a space dedicated to the research, production, and dissemination of contemporary art.

The gallery works with emerging and mid-career artists, supporting the development of their practices while creating a context for dialogue, experimentation, and reflection around the diverse forms of contemporary artistic expression. Its program is characterized by a diversity of languages and approaches, as well as an interest in establishing connections between the local artistic scene and the international context.

From Mallorca, Galería Reus aims to actively contribute to the contemporary cultural ecosystem by promoting projects that encourage exchange, artistic research, and the development of new perspectives.


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Represented
Alejandro Javaloyas
Callum Green
Daniel Roibal
Elen Braga
José Fiol
Karolina Albricht
Julià Panadés
Marian Garrido
Miquel Ponce




CollaboratorsAbel Jaramillo
Alexandra Hunts
Erika Trotzig
David Martín
Irati Inoriza
Tommy Lecot
Evgenia Duvnikova
Daniel Dominguez
Martin Paaskesen
Ricardo Cases






UN CUCHILLO QUE NO CORTA -  ALEJANDRO JAVALOYAS

Curated by Sofia Moisés



Dates
04/06/2026 - 01/09/2026

Art Palma Summer 2026

Text “So much faith is placed in life, in life in its most precarious aspect, in real life, naturally, that faith eventually disappears. Man, that incurable dreamer…” With these words, written more than a century ago, André Breton opened the Manifesto of Surrealism. The dream ceased to be understood as a secondary accident of consciousness and became an essential dimension of human existence. Visible reality is no longer enough to sustain us; everyday life, in its most rational and functional form, is incapable of controlling fear, guilt, desire, memory, or anguish.

Un cuchillo que no corta, by Alejandro Javaloyas, begins with a poem. A set of verses built from negation: “a key that does not open, a lamp that does not give light, a Virgin who does not ascend, a faith that does not console.” The objects have lost what justified their existence, yet the world keeps turning. The poem progresses gradually from the domestic to the spiritual: first, everyday objects are eroded; then, nature; finally, religious and metaphysical structures. The last two verses reveal the true core of the text: “The soul that is not eternal./ A bad dream that perishes.”

The images that make up the exhibition come from the artist’s recurring nightmares, hastily written down in notebooks kept on his bedside table. There is something surrealist in the ambiguous state in which sleep has not yet fully ended, giving rise to an automatic writing that escapes the control of reason and allows approaches from hidden places of consciousness.

In this case, however, the fragmentary and decontextualized notes are part of a much more complex process, in which artificial intelligence systems intervene to generate images that never existed, even though they belong to a lost memory. For a long time, we have thought of AI as a tool intended to perfect human actions. Today, we realize that it often acts in the opposite way, generating arbitrary associations, deforming their meaning, or expanding their ambiguity and abstraction. These results remind us of the logic of dreams and open up an entire interpretive universe.

The path is almost circular: the dream becomes text; the text, algorithmic image; the algorithmic image, manual drawing; and the drawing, finally, returns the image to a physical body.

The pieces are not photographs or digital prints, but drawings made with colored pencil from previously blurred images. In this process, Javaloyas works through superimpositions and chromatic glazes that progressively recover the light and presence of the image, a conscious decision that refers back to the methods of indirect painting in the Flemish tradition. As in the grisaille of Jan van Eyck’s painting, the image slowly emerges from a spectral state until it acquires a living and delicate form. The pictorial gesture of recovering the degraded image is not incidental, but the central allegory of the project: just as the nightmare resists the effort to be remembered, the image resists the effort to be recovered.

If historical Surrealism accessed the unconscious through automatic writing, Un cuchillo que no corta does so by externalizing the method toward the technological present. The textual residue of the nightmare is processed by an ethereal intelligence that, in some way, simulates several Freudian mechanisms: condensation, displacement, and free association. Thus, we might say that the final images do not literally illustrate the original nightmares, but are possible and imperfect versions, vestiges that have taken on another form.

In Maybe the next time, darling, for example, a wrecked car appears, stopped in a dark and damp place. The framing does not allow us to see beyond the headlight glass and the impact that seems to have happened moments before. The vehicle belongs to the artist’s childhood memory and also connects with the imagery of David Cronenberg’s film Crash. In this way, the individual nightmare merges with collective cinematic memory, transforming intimacy into a shared experience.

If we tried to reconstruct the dream by following the reverse process —from the final painting back to the text, from the text back to the original nightmare— perhaps we would obtain only fragments:

“The slope never ends. The car moves backward without making a sound. My mother is no longer inside. I try to call out to her, but my voice comes out too late....”

The work no longer belongs entirely to the dream that originated it. It is now an artifact capable of generating new narratives, memories, and dreams in those who observe it.

The indeterminacy of the images contains the full conceptual force of the project: the struggle against disappearance. The scenes seem to evaporate slowly, attempting to resist before definitively disintegrating. Oblivion threatens the ideas written down in the notebooks, and this process is nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold on to what inevitably fades away.

The dream is an image impossible to fix; language, an insufficient attempt to narrate it; artificial intelligence, an involuntary medium; and painting, the physical and manual return to an image that has begun to expire.

These visions inhabit an ambiguous territory between fear and revelation. On the one hand, the atavistic terror of childhood nightmares reappears: the unease of something that never fully reveals itself, what Freud called das Unheimliche, the familiar strange that would not allow itself to be seen clearly. On the other hand, some pieces seem to approach the spiritual suspension described by Simone Weil in La pesanteur et la grace: the instant in which something seems to rise not because it has overcome gravity, but because it has stopped opposing it.

The representations in Un cuchillo que no corta are caught in this state of flotation, as if we still did not know whether they belong to dream or to memory.

This visual fragility has to do with a spiritual fragility; with the human need to construct images capable of representing what we do not understand. This is how death runs through all the works in a silent yet unsettling way —accidents, fires, suspended bodies, religious symbols, nocturnal animals— while at the same time proposing a return to spirituality as a human need to construct meaning.

The pictorial, literary, and cinematic references form part of Javaloyas’s visual unconscious. It seems as though David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Caravaggio, or Carl Theodor Dreyer also intervene in the creative process of a personal mythology in permanent construction. The titles of the works emphasize these associations and further reveal the mystical dimension of the proposal: the desire to find faith and the human need to face life’s crossroads with purpose.

Freud understood religion as an illusion that served to protect the individual from worldly terror. Even so, symbolic images seem useful when thinking about what we cannot resolve through reason. The pieces in Un cuchillo que no corta seem to participate in this lack, becoming cult images created to accept uncertainty and fight against emptiness.

The initial poem deactivates the world, emptying forms of their utility. By contrast, Javaloyas’s work moves in the opposite direction. Faced with the threat of vacuity, it responds with images, connections, and narratives. Constructing a blurred and vulnerable corpus that embraces fragility as the only possible form of permanence.


Sofia Moisés