Reynier Llanes: Elsewhere, Within

Firetti Contemporary presents Elsewhere, Within, Reynier Llanes' second solo exhibition with the gallery. It brings together works from his series 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 the imagined, the exhibition continues Llanes' exploration of storytelling, memory and human experience, reflecting on how encounters with places, people and events shape who we become and what we carry forward. Bodega marks a new chapter in Llanes' visual language. The transparency that defines the figure in The Poet passes to the vessel, shifting attention to what is gathered and kept over a lifetime. Flowers accumulate within these forms, turning a familiar still-life object into a metaphor for the places, relationships, memories, losses, hopes and encounters we carry with us. Clear yet protective, fragile yet resilient, the vessels suggest an inner world that stays visible even as it continues to grow and change. The relationship between the individual and the world runs throughout the exhibition. In The Tourist, Llanes turns to curiosity, encounter and the possibilities of the unfamiliar: his travellers do not merely observe the worlds around them, they enter them. In Halos, two divers lie intertwined in a luminous field of grass and flowers rather than underwater, absorbed into a landscape beyond the element to which they seem to belong. Elsewhere, travellers cross terrains that shift between the earthly and the imagined, turning landscape into a space of exploration and discovery. Where The Tourist ventures outwards, The Poet looks inwards, to the experience of being human. Conceived 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 its surroundings. 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 lies curled in a bathtub drawn from Llanes' childhood memories of his grandmother's home in rural Cuba, where an old yellow bathtub served as a planter for herbs. The artist calls it an 'instrument of memory', able to carry another person, place and moment from the past into the present. In Eden, memory gives way to beginnings: a couple face each other beneath an abundant apple tree in a scene drawn from the biblical garden, as Llanes turns to love, union and the making of a shared life, and to how an encounter with another person can itself be transformative. Throughout Elsewhere, Within, boundaries stay porous — between figure and landscape, past and present, the lived and the imagined, the individual and the world. Trained in Realism, Llanes has moved increasingly towards an Impressionistic approach, letting recognisable forms loosen into expressive passages of colour, texture and gesture. This movement between observation and imagination mirrors the exhibition's wider concerns, where 'elsewhere' may be another place, another time, a memory, an imagined world or another person. What begins outside the self gradually finds its way inward: the worlds we pass through never entirely disappear, and something of them remains within us.