Alejandro Javaloyas
Alejandro Javaloyas has had nightmares almost every night since childhood. He writes them down in notebooks by his bed, and about two years ago he began turning them into drawings. Javaloyas was born in Palma de Mallorca, studied painting as a child and went to film school in Barcelona. He now lives and works in Toulouse. He keeps his drawings hazy, "something you can recognize, but never completely grasp." His series Un cuchillo que no corta is named after a poem he wrote about things that have lost their purpose, like a knife that doesn't cut.
Q: You trained in drawing and painting from the age of six to eighteen. How did you come to the work you make now?
A: The work I make now, these photorealistic representations of personal and collective traumatic scenes, would not be possible without that very academic training. As a kid I studied with three Majorcan painters: Ernest, Malena Tous, and Antònia Oliver. We worked with pencil, charcoal, dry pastel and oil, doing endless hatching exercises, life drawing and copies of old masters. It was an education almost entirely focused on virtuosity. A painting was good or bad depending on how well it was executed.
I already felt something was missing, but technically it gave me an extraordinary foundation.
What I care about most now, though, is atmosphere: the uncanny, that very thin line where beauty starts becoming sinister. I learned that later at film school. Cinema showed me how free an image could be, and that technique matters enormously, but only because it allows you to say what you want without being limited by your hands.
Q: You've kept notes of your nightmares by the bed for years. What do you write down?
A: I've had nightmares almost every night since I was a kid, so I've kept notebooks by the bed for years. What I write down is very fragmentary: an image, a sound, a smell, a fear, sometimes just a few incomplete words written at four in the morning that I barely understand the next day.
They're not narratives, and for a long time I never thought of them as material for art. About two years ago, I started going back through those notebooks with the idea of reconstructing some of those fragments visually.
Gradually, it became a way of building a kind of cosmology of my most vulnerable self: my fears, anxieties and personal traumas. They come from a very private place, but I hoped that by making them visible, some of those fears might also feel strangely familiar to other people.
Q: How do you get that haze and soft contours into an image?
A: I work from photographic references for these photorealistic drawings. The source can be almost anything: an image found online, a family photograph, a film still, something AI-generated. When an image resonates with one of my nightmare notes, I put it through a fairly aggressive digital editing process.
I crop it heavily, blur it, desaturate it, and reduce the contrast until the reference itself is already foggy and unstable. Then I draw from that. If the source image is too crisp, the drawing will almost inevitably become too crisp as well.
I'm actually quite ruthless about it. I've painted over drawings that took weeks because the result felt too defined. I want the images to remain uncanny, eerie, hazy, almost oneiric: something you can recognize, but never completely grasp.
Q: You studied filmmaking for years. What did you take from it into the painting?
A: Probably the most important thing film school gave me was the idea of atmosphere. I had never really thought about it that way before.
It probably came from the filmmakers I was drawn to: Haneke, Antonioni, Lars von Trier, Gus Van Sant, Béla Tarr, Roy Andersson, Yorgos Lanthimos. Many of them deliberately resist the classical idea that a film has to derive its value from a clean three-act structure. Their narratives can become fragmented or almost dissolve completely, and the film starts operating somewhere less rational.
That is what I love. You stop following a story in the usual way and start inhabiting a mood. The film feels like a dream, or mental fog. It pulls you in without fully explaining itself. That is very close to what I try to do with my drawings.
Q: Where does the title Un cuchillo que no corta come from?
A: It's the title of a poem I wrote before I made the first drawing. The poem works almost like a list of things that have lost their essential function, and therefore something of their identity: a knife that doesn't cut, a gun that doesn't kill, a mirror that doesn't reflect.
The list gradually moves from the domestic into nature and, eventually, into a spiritual realm: the Virgin who doesn't ascend, the martyr who doesn't die, the soul that isn't eternal.
For me, the poem is really a way of asking whether there is anything after death. It comes from uncertainty, but also from a fairly desperate desire to believe there is. Some of the earliest drawings illustrated specific verses quite literally. Then the body of work started expanding, and eventually outgrew the poem that had triggered it.
Q: The series is still ongoing. How much further does it have to go?
A: Yes, it's still ongoing, and it keeps outgrowing the restrictions I originally gave it. For almost two years, I was focused very specifically on illustrating personal nightmares and private fears.
Lately, that universe has started expanding toward collective trauma too. I've been working with images like an extreme close-up of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at a party in the 1980s, or Jackie Kennedy's blood-stained skirt after the assassination of JFK. They don't come from my personal memory, obviously, but they belong to a shared visual memory of fear, violence, and unease.
The series keeps growing in that direction. The visual language is still the same, as are the underlying obsessions: the inexorability of time, decay, aging, and the fear of death.
