Firetti Contemporary is pleased to present Elsewhere, Within, Reynier Llanes’ second solo exhibition at the gallery, bringing together works from The Tourist and The Poet alongside the debut of Bodega, a new series in which the human figure gives way to transparent vessels overflowing with flowers. Moving between the real and imagined, the exhibition continues Llanes’ exploration of storytelling, memory and human experience, considering how encounters with places, people and experiences shape who we become and what we carry forward.
Bodega marks a new development in Llanes’ visual language. The transparency that characterises the figure in The Poet is transferred to the vessel, shifting attention towards what is gathered and retained over the course of a life. Flowers accumulate within these forms, transforming the familiar still-life object into a metaphor for the places, relationships, memories, losses, hopes and encounters that we carry with us. Clear yet protective, fragile yet resilient, the vessels suggest an inner world that remains visible even as it continues to accumulate and change.
This relationship between the individual and the world extends throughout the exhibition. In The Tourist, Llanes turns towards curiosity, encounter and the possibilities of the unfamiliar. His travellers do not simply observe the worlds around them; they enter them. In Halos, two divers lie intertwined within a luminous field of grass and flowers rather than beneath water, becoming absorbed into a landscape beyond the environment to which they seemingly belong. Elsewhere, travellers move through terrains that shift between the earthly and imagined, transforming landscape into a space of exploration and discovery.
Where The Tourist ventures outward, The Poet turns towards the inner experience of being human. Developed during the pandemic, the Poet is a translucent figure deliberately left without a fixed identity. Landscape, colour and light remain visible through its body, suggesting a self that is present yet permeable to the world around it. Across the series, the figure moves through the milestones and uncertainties of a life, from love and loss to memory, hope and the search for meaning.
In Time Travelers, the Poet appears curled within a bathtub drawn from Llanes’ childhood memories of his grandmother’s home in rural Cuba, where an old yellow bathtub had been repurposed as a planter for herbs. Llanes describes the object as an “instrument of memory,” capable of carrying another person, place and moment from the past into the present. In Eden, memory gives way to beginnings. A couple face one another beneath an abundant apple tree in a scene that draws upon the biblical Garden of Eden. Here, Llanes turns towards love, union and the formation of a shared life, considering how an encounter with another person can become its own form of transformation.
Throughout Elsewhere, Within, boundaries remain porous: between figure and landscape, past and present, the lived and imagined, and the individual and the world around them. Trained in Realism, Llanes has increasingly moved towards a more Impressionistic approach, allowing recognisable forms to loosen into expressive passages of colour, texture and gesture. This movement between observation and imagination echoes the exhibition’s broader concerns, where “elsewhere” may be another place, another time, a memory, an imagined world or another person. Across the exhibition, what begins outside the self gradually finds its way inward.
The worlds we pass through never entirely disappear. Something of them remains within us.
