Personal Picks: Annie Fajardo

Personal Picks is a new format where someone from our team selects four artworks that resonate with them on a personal level. From intimate favorites to unexpected discoveries, each selection offers an individual, behind-the-scenes glimpse into the gallery’s evolving universe—one artwork at a time.

Next up: Annie Fajardo. As Communication Manager at Alzueta Gallery, Annie works at the crossroads of image, language, narrative and strategy, shaping how exhibitions, artists, and ideas travel beyond the gallery walls. Moving between texts, visuals, and conversations, she is particularly interested in how art creates emotional narratives and how images linger in memory.

For her Personal Picks, Annie turns to cinema as a guiding thread. Her selection brings together four artworks that resonate with her relationship to film, each one evoking a scene, a mood, or a moment suspended in time. Drawing connections between painting and the cinematic language of directors she admires, her choices reflect an intuitive way of looking, where artworks become emotional landscapes, and images emerge like fragments of remembered films.

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My relationship with art has somehow always been inseparable from cinema. Films taught me how to look slowly, how to trust atmosphere over plot, and how a single image can hold an entire emotional world. That’s why when I was choosing these works, I found myself returning to that feeling: for me, paintings and photographs that don’t illustrate a story, but create a scene. Works that feel suspended in time, charged with quiet tension, tenderness, sometimes magic or melancholy, like a film still you can’t stop thinking about or you end up dreaming.

Each of these artists evokes a different cinematic universe I hold close, not through direct reference, but through mood, rhythm, and emotional atmosphere.

Larissa Lockshin’s Untitled (Red Sun Dress) brings me back to Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are: a sense of vulnerability wrapped in softness, childhood memory filtered through adult longing. There’s something tender and unresolved in her figures, as if they exist in that fragile space between innocence and awareness.

Hiroki Kawanabe’s Still recalls the understated poetry of Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves. The stillness, the restrained palette, the quiet dignity of everyday objects. His paintings feel like pauses, moments where nothing dramatic happens, yet everything is felt.

Amy Friend’s I Will Look for You in the Depth of Blue resonates deeply with Jonas Mekas’ As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. Fragmented, intimate, and emotional, her work feels like memory itself: incomplete, luminous, and deeply personal. An image that doesn’t explain, but remembers.

Finally, Miho Ichise’s Calm Flow carries the gentle magic of Hayao Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service. A quiet sense of balance, care, and everyday wonder. Her work feels calm without being static, rooted in small gestures that hold something quietly transformative. When I watched this movie for the first time it made me feel as excited and a sort of comfort as I feel when I see Miho’s work.

At the end, these works don’t shout. They linger. Like cinema, they invite you to stay with them, to project your own memories, and to let meaning find its way slowly. This is what my Personal Picks mean to me: choosing not just with the eye, but with memory, emotion, and affection. 
Annie Fajardo