JOMAD & Tiffany Alfonseca: Inner Gardens

Inner Gardens is a contemporary art exhibition at OOA Gallery in Barcelona featuring JOMAD and Tiffany Alfonseca. Bringing together two compelling voices in contemporary figurative painting, the exhibition highlights works shaped by portraiture, symbolism, color, and cultural memory. From immersive floral environments to richly layered representations of Afro-diasporic identity, Inner Gardens offers a fresh perspective on figuration today.

Inner Gardens stages a dialogue between two distinct approaches to contemporary figuration. JOMAD and Tiffany Alfonseca both place the human figure within dense, immersive worlds, yet the meaning of those spaces unfolds in different and highly resonant ways.

In JOMAD’s work, the surrounding environment becomes an interior landscape. Born in Martinique, the artist has developed a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, ceramics, and public art, informed by studies in visual arts, architecture, and design. This structural sensibility gives her work a strong sense of composition, rhythm, and spatial balance. Her paintings are inhabited by introspective figures who emerge from lush floral and botanical fields charged with emotion and symbolic intensity.
These settings are not decorative backdrops. They function as psychological spaces where memory, resilience, and transformation take visual form. Through layered color, repetition, and scale, JOMAD creates paintings that feel both intimate and monumental. Her ceramic works extend this language further, introducing hand-shaped surfaces and bold graphic motifs that suggest concealment, protection, and acts of reclamation. Across media, her practice constructs spaces that invite contemplation while holding a powerful visual presence.

Tiffany Alfonseca brings another vital energy to the exhibition. The Dominican-American artist is known for vibrant mixed-media paintings that celebrate Afro-diasporic identity with nuance, strength, and tenderness. Her portraits center Black and Afro-Latin subjects within richly textured environments where pattern, surface, and color become inseparable from the emotional life of the figure.
Alfonseca’s work is grounded in lived experience and personal heritage, yet it speaks to broader questions of family, womanhood, belonging, and cultural visibility. Her compositions reject reductive narratives, offering instead expansive images of dignity, beauty, and self-possession. Saturated hues, layered textures, and ornamental detail give her paintings immediate visual force, while their emotional depth sustains a lasting impact.

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