Froylán Ojeda
A film for - and letters to - a painter lost and found
When you’re an archivist you care for, and you protect, an object. You surround it with safeguarding spells within cushions, gloves, vaults, boxes, files and temperature regulations. When you’re also a researcher, you take said object and you untangle its myriad stories and evolutions. Piece by piece, you tell its story. When the object is caught in-extremis, the research becomes a spell. When you find yourself intoxicated with serendipity and coincidence, you know the object is responding to you: the person behind the object has found its chosen route. When you’re an archivist, a researcher and a curator or a writer, you take the object and the research and unleash it, drenching it in the luminous for the world to see. What follows are words, film stills and a recording of all the ways Froylán Ojeda (1938-1991) and I, Alexia Marmara, have been murmuring to each other.
A few years ago I became enraptured by a photograph of a painting. I knew nothing of the artist bar a name and a city, Mexico City. A few years later, driven by my own desire to paint, I found myself in sand city. I began a search for this person, realising soon enough that no one around me had heard of him. One day, by chance, I found myself aimlessly wandering. Was it aimless? I entered a book shop and the first thing I noticed on a shelf was a whole book just about this person I had waited years to meet. With the glee of a person experiencing the surrealness of a “love at first sight” encounter, I returned to the neighbourhood I was staying in at the time, Tlalpan. Pushed by more winds of this strange destiny, I asked for the taxi to drop me off earlier. I wanted to wander aimlessly again but this time with my book in hand. A few new corners later, I found myself facing a copy of the same rare book - again. This time, on the floor, a market seller, the only one on that street, had placed you next to miscellaneous trinkets. To me, this apparition was everything but miscellaneous. I left the book there, adamant to let someone else experience the magic of this painter: Froylán Ojeda.
When I returned to England I found myself looking at the book, peering into the paintings daily. I wanted to much more, I wanted this artist to be unleashed from whichever dusty confines theyhad found themselves in. By that point, there were a few more images of them peppered online: someone was doing the work. This is how I found their nephew, Abelardo. Their nephew told me they were a man, not a Fraulein. So began my quest to find this person who had pierced my subconscious. I received the support of the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant to begin the initial process of bringing this artist back from the chilly rooms of Art History. A year later after my first encounter with the books, I returned to Mexico City. This is when I contacted artist and writer Ximena Prieto to document this journey. In she bought artist and filmmaker Ines Barquet who sky rocketed the research. With us three on the front lines, magic and coincidence peppered our quest to find this artist lost.
Below are stills from the film Froylán (2025 | dir. Ines Barquet & Ximena Prieto) as well as a reading of a small selection of the letters I wrote to Froylán Ojeda when I returned from my adventures in time and my world as I knew it collapsed onto itself. This became a way to reckon with the immensity of the story we had created together, albeit posthumously.
