Jonny Alexander

A MEMORY OF LIGHT
May 9, 2026

There are moments in life when the forest finally thins. Not because the darkness was overcome, but because something in us has learned to carry a different kind of light. Jonny Alexander's first solo exhibition in Latin America, ‘A Memory of Light’, arrives as both a record of that passage and an open invitation into it.

The fifteen paintings gathered in the exhibition trace a landscape that is at once geographic and interior. Alexander, a San Diego-based artist whose practice has moved through still life, figure, and abstraction, arrives now at something harder to name: a fully inhabited painterly world in which forest, clearing, well, reservoir, and light source come together to form a complete symbolic vocabulary. Each element holds its ground independently while speaking to all the others.

A small body of still water appears in nearly every canvas, always positioned between the viewer and a more distant, luminous expanse. The well of intuition, ever present, always pointing beyond itself. In this symbolism, Alexander finds a connection with Caspar David Friedrich (1774), the painter who made standing at the edge of a vast landscape feel like the most honest portrait of a human interior, and who held that the external world only becomes worthy of the canvas when it carries the full weight of the interior one. Alexander's landscapes are framed by that standard.

The title A Memory of Light came from a studio visitor who, standing before The Well, searched for a phrase to encapsulate her experience, and she found the precise: “this gives me a memory of light”. The phrase transcended because it holds more than one meaning. In physics, light is information that surfaces carry long after illumination passes. In painting, it is the atmospheric residue of experience, not the thing itself but its imprint. In the traditions Alexander quietly invokes, it is the trace of something once fully alive in us that we are, in this life, slowly learning to remember.

The four-part ‘Allegory of Thresholds’ gives the exhibition its structural spine: dark forest, transitional treeline, open clearing, encompassing overview. But the progression is not triumphant. The forest is not left behind so much as understood. Closure here is not an ending but a crossing. What waits beyond the treeline is not a reward but a recognition: that something bright was there all along, and we are finally close enough to see it.

‘A Memory of Light’ extends Colector’s program’s focus on artists who engage with environmental conditions as systems of thought, while marking a pivotal moment in Alexander's evolution toward a more immersive, cohesive painterly language.

Lorenzo Martz