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 in safeguarding spells sheltered 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 and 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 and tale behind the object have 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 a residency there. I began a silent search for this person, realising soon enough that no one around me had heard of him. One day, aimlessly wandering, I entered a book shop and the first thing I noticed on a shelf was a whole, very rare book, published and edited by this person I had waited years to meet. 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 sacred book - again. This time, on the floor: a market seller, the only one on that street, had placed it next to miscellaneous trinkets. This apparition felt as if everything had been placed in front of me that day. 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 addicted to the book, peering into the paintings daily. I wanted to much more, I wanted this artist to be unleashed from whichever dusty confines they had 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 the painter was 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 book, 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 to history but forever close to his loved ones.
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 (terribly recorded on a phone…) This became a way to reckon with the immensity of the story we had created together, albeit posthumously.
music by Yann Marmara
The Mexico City-based research for this project was made possible by the Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Research Grant
Many thanks to Abelardo Ojeda, for opening these doors of perception in the first place.