The work of Alejandra Roux, an Argentine artist who has lived in Madrid for twenty years, makes clear her ongoing belief in the narrative and emotional potential of painting. Based on the story by the Brothers Grimm, her recent exhibition “Hänsel & Gretel” evoked the sexually charged fear and violence that, as Bruno Bettelheim ascertained long ago, underlie many childhood stories. Phallic and vaginal metaphors abound, and eroticism is one of the unequivocal drives in this work; it is felt in objects not usually associated with the erotic (like the stole around the neck of the lady in La madrastra [The Stepmother], 2010) and in spaces where one would least expect it, like the hole in the tree trunk in Casa de la bruja (The Witch’s House), 2009. Sometimes, for instance in La bruja (The Witch), 2009, which shows a figure whose ass is literally on fire, recalling the Duchampian L.H.O.O.Q., this eroticism is evoked verbally rather than visually.

Held at the same gallery three years ago, Roux’s prior show in Madrid included a group of paintings that revolved around the city and its buildings. The pieces of real estate in those pictures, based on buildings in north Buenos Aires, seemed realistic at first, only to later reveal an underlying strangeness. In “Hänsel & Gretel,” 2008–11, the series exhibited in this show, the uncanny is based on familiar stories, and not on an everyday landscape. There is, however, the same tension derived from the clash between an innocent appearance and a reality that contradicts it. Nothing is entirely strange here, and yet anything can become strange. Some things are seen and others are merely suggested. In this iconography, somewhere between stereotype and expression, the artist makes use of traditional motifs that are found in illustrations of childhood stories but are full of ambiguous signs that suggest a reality that contradicts appearances. The influence of the vocabulary of basic and primary forms found in certain Renaissance paintings, especially those of Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, is also evident. The artist brilliantly combines those forms with visual elements from an array of other sources, ranging from ornamental psychedelia to advertising. She has also been influenced by Mariano Dis Berlin, a veteran Spanish painter who has always been on the margins of the art scene but who makes work with remarkable pictorial energy and lucidity. It is very likely Dis Berlin who inspired some of Roux’s iconographic choices as well as her way of playing the edge between the stereotypical and the symbolic in seemingly ingenuous motifs that—in true Pop style—grow all the more expressive as they approach pure cliché. Dis Berlin’s influence also seems evident in Roux’s use of bright and expressive color, which, in the younger artist’s hands, becomes a very intense resource.

—Pablo Llorca

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.