Jiashun Zhou
b. 1999, Chinese
Alejandro Javaloyas: Un cuchillo que no corta
Galeria Reus, Palma, ES
On view through September 1 at Galeria Reus in Palma, curated by Sofía Moisés, Un cuchillo que no corta marks the first public presentation of a genuinely new direction in Alejandro Javaloyas’s practice. The title — A Knife That Does Not Cut — announces the exhibition’s central paradox: an instrument that implies violence but withholds it, a form that points toward rupture while remaining suspended just before the wound. What follows is a body of small-format works that operate, formally and conceptually, in exactly that register: hovering, almost trembling, suspended, and utterly unresolved.
The project begins in the dark, literally. For years, Javaloyas has kept notebooks beside his bed, recording the fragments of recurring nightmares immediately after waking — images, phrases, colors, figures, fears, and objects that return insistently through the night. These notes are, by nature, partial and unstable: attempts to hold onto something already in the process of disappearing. The work begins precisely in that gap between the intensity of the dreamed image and the inadequacy of language to preserve it. The process he has developed is one of successive translations and displacements. Dream images become text prompts, text prompts become generated images. The machine functions here as a kind of external unconscious — a system that takes private, fragmentary memory as input and returns images that are simultaneously intimate and generic.
And, of course, there is something genuinely strange about this arrangement: a human subjectivity outsourcing its own dream-imagery to an algorithm, then retrieving the result as though it were a developed photograph retrieved from a lab. From the hundreds of generated images, the chosen images are reworked on paper until they become what he calls unstable visual grounds: hazy, spectral, photographic in origin but no longer photographic in character — resulting in colored pencil on cotton paper works, mounted on wooden panels. Their glazed, veiled quality functions both as a formal signature and conceptual device; a way of building into the work’s visual logic the very impossibility of fully grasping what has been seen, feared, or remembered. These are images that seem to know they are compromised.
The exhibition’s iconography consists of burning houses, wounds, lambs, mouths, flowers, curtains, prayers, religious gestures, and domestic objects. Therefore, the motifs are familiar enough to activate a certain symbolic recognition. The biblical, the cinematic, the personal, and the everyday coexist within the same image-field, and the atmosphere they produce is one of adjacency rather than narrative: things placed near one another that do not quite explain each other. This is precisely the grammar of dreams, of course, and it is also the grammar of a certain strand of art history — Symbolist, Surrealist, and post-Surrealist — that has always found its subject matter in the threshold between sleep and waking.
Alongside the drawings, the exhibition includes three installations and a video piece that extend the project beyond the framed image into the gallery’s physical space. Together, these elements construct what the exhibition describes as a fragile mythology — a world where images seem to emerge from the dream even as they begin to disappear. What Un cuchillo que no corta ultimately proposes is a meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of image-capture: on what it means to try to hold onto an image that was never stable to begin with, and on what happens when you pass it through multiple systems — neurological, linguistic, algorithmic, digital, manual — each of which introduces its own deformation. The knife that does not cut might also be understood as a drawing that does not fully arrive, a memory that does not fully surface. Javaloyas’s achievement is that this incompleteness is not a failure but the work’s most precise formal statement.
For more information, please consult Galeria Reus’s website →
Last Updated on June 10, 2026
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
