Is there a term like disquiet but bigger than that?

A word for shaking and turning and moving and the bending of a trajectory. For someone whose voice has, after death, lain quiet and unspoken for. What’s the word for disquiet but bigger so I can describe my own perturbation because I seek someone else’s?

I am talking about my search into the life and work of Froylán Ojeda (1932-1991), a Mexican artist from Porto de Veracruz. His penchant for creating alternate worlds and painting new realities began at a young age after he left his home for Mexico City. Unable to find his family's acceptance of his relationship with his lifelong partner Jesús, he gained almost immediate recognition as an artist in university where he was frequently awarded grants and prizes. As his personal language developed, he exhibited worldwide and held a very important presence in the Mexican art scene from the time. His creative output continued to expand as he became a celebrated portrait artist to celebrities and politicians, revered art critic, curator, television presenter and textile designer. Towards the end of his life, his partner was involved in a tragic car accident and legal fees had to be covered by Ojeda with the sale of a lot of his work. After his passing from HIV/AIDS he slowly began disappearing from the conversation. When I contacted his nephew Abelardo Ojeda, he asserted that no one had asked him or his family about his uncle since his passing in 1991.

What exists of Froylán Ojeda on internet search engines shows a very limited catalog of his work, unrepresentative of his genius. It all started for me in 2020, when I felt punctured by the encounter of a scan of his painting, Convergencias, and I found myself feverishly searching for its creator. There were only a few crumbs of information shared with the image – a name, Froylán Ojeda and a place, La Ciudad de México – and countless questions remained. A few years later, I came into contact with his nephew, Mexico-city based photographer Abelardo Ojeda. With his remaining family members and his close friends, the women who revelled in his portraiture the most, I have been compiling his oral biography. These facts have been caught in-extremis: with personal anecdotes disappearing from the conversation, so will the realities of Froylán Ojeda that live outside of the press and features of the time. In the wonderful libraries and institutions of Mexico I have often been the first to request material of his work and am the instigator of the creation of a timeline of the 600+ art shows (solo shows and group exhibitions)he was involved in. In addition, the symbolism found in his paintings has led me down an unexpected research path, one that arises from intuitive searching.Webs start weaving themselves between the artist and myself, where the limited facts gathered become starting points propelling me to imagine his steps and movement. Through this I locate lost paintings, out-of-print books, and the children of his best friends. The cadence of these findings varies in pace,with movement often feeling like I am being guided by his own steps. This is a dance I’ve been utterly consumed by.

When I first discovered his work, a fantasy of sorts unravelled, “I’m gonna meet this woman, this Fraulein Ojeda,” I had wrongfully assumed him to be a woman, drawing from the the softness and delicacy of his work, likening his to that of women surrealists. “I’ll curate a show with her work and I’ll sing her praises directly to her face because I can and because she wanted me to see that photo on her Tumblr account.” Yet there was, as I began to dig into the story of Froylán, a lack of pieces in the puzzle. Based far away from his home, I originally only  had the limited Google-search results, and a cluster of other scans of his uncle’s paintings that Abelardo had shared on a Tumblr account. I eventually acquired a copy of a poetry anthology, El Rehilete, illustrated by Froylán Ojeda. That disquiet within me grew  as I struggled to find Froylán.

At times it has felt like a difficult dance, where Froylán as my invisible partner would lead me down a certain road, peppering my research with tiny clues. I would be twirled around in different directions regularly, often left to my own devices and sometimes meeting remnants of his through his friends and family. The less I knew, the more I wanted to move towards it. When I would locate rare information concerning him, I imagined it to be permission granted by the artist as he continued to lead the way. Our movement was a tangle: one translucent body that was gradually unleashing its secrets and my own, one that had invested so much of its emotional capacity into finding it.

As archivists, our role is to understand that absence does not mean silence. That, even though archives are filled with voices, uncatalogued stories have a language and pitch of their own. What I’ve learned through this research project into Froylán Ojeda is a bigger conversation about the natural power of silence.

My search for Froylán in his own environment has taken place through three chapters. Initially chasing my own painting dreams, I applied for a painting residency in Mexico City. At the time, thoughts of curating a show of this artist’s work pushed me to search for programmes closer to him. I hadn’t yet come into contact with his nephew and was unaware of his passing. During this stay, I encountered the only book of his work twice in one day, once as the only book standing tall in very cluttered bookshop, and another time in a completely different part of the city on a carpet on the floor in front of a church sold next to miscellaneous trinkets. After beginning a conversation with his nephew via email and video calls, I applied for a grant to begin an official search. The terms of the grant were to either curate a show at a later date or programme an event around my research. On an intuitive whim, I contacted artist Ximena Prieto who I had never met before and asked her if she wanted to make a film about my search. In turn, she brought in filmmaker and artist Ines Barquet. Including them in the world of Froylán Ojeda was welcomed with incessant and coincidences relating to him that became constant reassurance that I had made the correct decision. The film, Froylán, is almost complete.

The third time in Mexico City was thanks to a self-directed research residency within a gallery program, where every minute of my time is dedicated to him. When I’m not haunting the libraries that might hold a hint of him, I’m talking about his life to everyone I come into contact with. Through friendships created through this search, I now collaborate with Mexican researchers, adamant to keep his story with his people in order to let his magic inspire those closer to him in context.

What agitates me most is that his afterlife is so silent. I’m filing screenshots of every search engine in libraries, catalogues or emails that say there’s no trace of him – receipts for this incomprehensible disappearance. Here’s what I now officially know.

Froylán Ojeda rebelliously left his home in Veracruz for Mexico City when he was a young man. He had met his life partner Jesús at a young age and his father didn’t approve. His own sister refused to speak to him. Once in CDMX, he worked first as a photo editor on la Calle Donceles, the street in El Centro Historico that specialises in photography and books (also, incidentally, the street on which I encountered his book for the first time.) He enrolled in art school and was awarded grants for the development of his voice as a painter.

Early comments on his shows describe him as being one of the most promising young painters in Mexican art. Observation of his catalog sees him embodying the Mexican painting style of the time, until, his sister-in-law says, he took mushrooms and his figures catapulted themselves into Surrealism.

Aged 27, he curated a show as an homage to a lesser-known painter whose career and life both ended too soon. Whilst he was developing the style through which I discovered him, he made a lot of his income through semi-underground salons of women dealing in art from their living rooms. Froylán Ojeda was often called up for portraits of these ladies when they wanted to be seen in the hand of a maestro who, in their own opinion, could see women with the things that surrounded them: beauty, grace and lots and lots of lovely birds. I have spoken to one of these living-room gallerists and she holds him so high in her esteem there hasn’t been a conversation in which tears haven’t filled her eyes. He was often exhibited alongside artists such as Diego Rivera, Sofía Bassi, Francisco Zúñinga, Luis Nishizawa, Angelina Beloff… I know now, after these 4 years of searching, that he was also a revered art critic, illustrated various queer poetry anthologies, was commissioned to paint portraits of celebrities and politicians, presented television shows, curated art exhibitions, and delivered talks for seminars in Mexican institutions. A lot of these things I know from being the first person to remove the dust on his name in library collections that hold the myriad ways his name was mentioned at the time. As his career sky rocketed and his solo shows caught like wild fire, he bought multiple homes. The party holiday house was in Cuernevaca. His studio house I have been to, I have sat in and learned about him from within it. He had his other home, not far from the studio one, in which he would hold fancy receptions that would, more often than not, make it to the events bulletin in national newspapers. This house has been destroyed, taking with it a few murals.

Towards the end of his life, as his partner was involved in a car accident and legal fees had to be covered by Ojeda, he ended up selling off most of his work and rendered his artistic output to be a fragile one. After his tragic passing from HIV/AIDS and losing his eyesight first, he slowly began disappearing from the conversation.

With every appearance of his name in nationally distributed newspapers such as El Universal, Jueves de Excelsior and Novedades, I ask myself “Where is Froylán within museums? and why on earth hadn’t I heard of him until now?” Though these are questions I continually ask myself, I’ve understood the secrecy of queerness in Mexico at the time, and the cruelty of stigma attached to HIV/AIDS. His family have also relayed the intricacies of his estate and the myriad court-cases happening between his immediate family and his partner’s. Following these misunderstandings came a fatigue, and the family stopped fighting.

Neglect of his story by the industry has created a fissure in the process of preservation of his catalogue of work. As a research project, reanimating the pneuma of Froylán is based on encounters with the people who knew him, the coincidental apparitions of his body of work, and those who now experience his work in hindsight. In archival form, the life and work of Froylán inspires worlds bigger than categorisation and academic preservation. Questions and empathy propel me as researcher and the ensuing audience into an examination of our own theoretical perspectives: who, in the cold walls of the History of Art, decides the fate of those relegated to the quiet zone and how, as an outsider, does one respectfully regenerate someone without repeating the actions of the problematics that spearheaded his disappearance in the first place? The detective work to excavate what surrounded his paintings has been a responsive assemblage of the constellations of ideas pertaining to what we have left of his story. In an effort similar to bricolage, collected pieces of the person’s life and the effects of his afterlife can be grouped together as a poetic quilt, similar to the one he himself wove in his lifetime.

Froylán as an archive, or lack thereof, inspires rebelliousness in classical archive research. Hunting for  his legacy in art history has created an understanding of the limits of what the art industry chooses to speak of and preserve. The absence of him in archives and history books leads to conviviality and negotiations between actively learning and letting chance encounter, intuition and serendipity take front seat.

I continually question the role of unknowing in this project and this enables me to face what I personally gain from our flawed system of remembrance. Here I encounter the purest form of discovery: the curiosity of the people I’ve met on the way asking themselves “who on earth is this Froylán Ojeda that is being feverishly searched for?”

Witnessing an oral biography, an unblurring and coming to life of a person as memory creates another layer of him in real time. We return to the profound nature of oral communication as being the earliest form of collective archiving, rejoining the initial innocence of someone’s passage on earth. As the project grows and morphs, connection and understanding shape the biggest legacy of the artist: the possibility to bring together different mediums and people, collating their own thoughts and experience into something even bigger than art.

Through Froylan we can learn of the barriers in navigating queerness in 1930s-1990s Mexico, of the curatorial salons spearheaded by women wanting their own portraits by Froylán Ojeda, the HIV/AIDS epidemic and the silent spidering vault of its documentation. The gaps in knowledge, rather than inciting frustrated feelings, help pull in greater investigations related to his life and times.

The non-static nature of the figures of his paintings, the form and ambiguity of the portraits painted suggest a diarised desire for freedom. Political and capitalist rules and regulations created inhibitions and a lack of freedom that could only be counteracted by imagination. Ojeda expands my own imagination and challenges the methods of research I acquired within the industry, transmogrifying my chronicling into a desire to correct a truncated narrative, securing a grander and more profound space within which he was already moving back and forth.

As there isn’t an “Estate of Froylán Ojeda” per se, this unfolding project questions the institutionalised regulations found in preservation as well as any distance between subject and researcher. The understanding of the story of Froylán and the thoughts arising from the slow archaeological process involving industry professionals and members of the public is one we should all carry.  

The story of Froylán Ojeda suggests an altogether new way of interacting with stories, how many of these exist worldwide and how they connect, through investigative work, as an eternal source for the spearheading of creative freedom and respect through research and eternalisation, opening floodgates of creative experience and experimentation. The strength of the hunt pushes for an uncovering of the permeability of someone’s work and output. The biggest part of a search is seeing the “object” come to life within someone else, partaking in securing the endlessness of the work and reach of a person. After all, painters embalm their loudest truths into their work, and Froylán’s paintings are surrounded by infinity.

A triptych painting by Froylán Ojeda triumphs in the dining room of his studio home on Calle Sonora. Elena Briones-Ojeda currently lives there with her son, Froylán. She describes this work as being a pintura inconclusa. Since she first said these words to me in March 2025, I haven’t been able to stop thinking of their power in describing the story of the painter. This year, she added layers to a split canvas already loaded with symbolism. He had begun the execution of an exceptional work of art after a seminal trip to Japan. According to Briones, this experiment marked the beginning of a new trajectory for Ojeda. He had begun walking down a new road and was robbed of the possibility to see where it might have led him.

Due to the uncomfortable effect of a posthumous blackout surrounding his career, the power of his name is no longer as relevant to collectors and museums. With the dispersal of his output, the trajectory of his memory ceases too. A lack of institutional desire fails to establish a long-term legacy. Just like the movement of his flesh, his body of work stopped moving. This has meant that hunting for Froylán has been a dream at times, but also an exhausting battle against rigid fortresses surrounding the shadow of facts uncovered. Though I partake in direct imagined dialog with the research process, which enables a magical filling in of gaps waiting to be stuffed, fragments of facts haunt and push me forward as I endlessly fight for his story’s resuscitation.

In the sublime of his personal sketchbook his own writing comes to life. A single, sparkling page among the pencil sketches has grabbed me:

Escuchameun momento, siento una necesidad de contarte…

(Listen to me for a moment, I feel the need to tell you…)

The end of this sentence is damaged, unreadable. The rest of the short letter is unclear: Froylán never gets to the point. Perhaps he never could. Calmly I wait for his story to elongate itself even further and finally rest in softer pockets where it has always belonged.
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