There are kind eyes here, wandering and curious, a gaze like a deliberately coy caress, like the steady strokes birthing the broken weaves of a chair, birthing the broken bones of plotted play.

We sit and we talk on the works as they lay resting on paint-splattered floors, gray and ashy, leaning on the walls. These are memories we share, we’ve both seen these chairs, and the wilderness of infrastructure left unwatched. Alfonso dismembers forms, isolating them and intensifying their character and the type of time read upon them. Outside it’s rain and music. Inside it’s an alchemical practice.

We talk of tennis and nurturing a good partner for a good match, of competition and generative antagonisms. We talk of revelatory gestures, world-building gestures born of wrists, made large by legs. We talk of clean cities that frequently feel frozen. We think together on the distance this affords from the hot light of the less purposefully pristine and how from here, here where we now speak, far as we are, it glows; the hot light glows and flickers.

The time Alfonso offers up is the type it takes to liberate the incidental and serendipitous. This time facilitates the fanciful flight of the refused and forgotten towards monument. That time can be long, but this alchemy is also about making time quick when the long starts to hurt. Rinella works fast to explore the slow. A type of time that now glows and flickers.

It’s really about catalyzing nervous laughs, seeing them made from the corner of the room. The tension is good. It’s fun when it’s funny. How else to talk to cities but to remind them that you too can be filled, honoring the potential in that empty you also carry and can leave unattended. From that cavernous dark, a glow. Belly laughs.

These cities serve up a time, Rinella counters and offers a new time. A time made rich with contradiction, a humane time that glows through distance and mediation. An auntie calls from that far off, the hot light of her time flickering on the phone. That glow alchemized in the body, a new type of time.

Alec Mateo

Rinella Alfonso is a painter currently based in Amsterdam, originally from Willemstad, Curaçao. Her work uses imagery informed by archives that she has collected over the years, reflecting her domestic environment, familial relationships, and the intersections of virtual and social landscapes.

Alec Mateo is a Dominican writer, artist, and performer based in Amsterdam, coming from New York.
He works with poetry and sound to explore fugitive subjectivity, and new modes of togetherness, drawing from black radical thought, folk traditions, and pop music culture.