The Secret Garden: Chechu Álava
Forthcoming exhibition
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Opening 2 October, 6 - 8pm
“When I began preparing this exhibition, I started researching the Bloomsbury Group, especially Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, with the idea of engaging in dialogue with them. But at that moment, my inner struggles, combined with the struggles of the world, made it difficult. The paintings did not flow smoothly… So I decided to leave my own room and enter the secret garden, where very subtle worlds inhabit and include many layers of reality.” — Chechu Álava
“The spring is blowing in through the open door; the lilacs are breaking into bud. I dig in the garden, and find it suits my mind… I feel more peaceful than for weeks.” - Virgina Woolf
Cob Gallery is pleased to present The Secret Garden, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Spanish artist Chechu Álava.
Álava is known for a painterly language that reimagines how women have been represented, remembered, and erased throughout the history of art. Based in Paris since 2001, she has developed a practice rooted in portraiture, where figures drawn from art, literature, and cultural history emerge through delicate veils of oil paint, their forms suspended between apparition and presence. When Alava first arrived in Paris, she encountered a contemporary art world dominated by conceptualism, where female voices were largely absent and women artists scarcely acknowledged in art history books. In response, she turned to the museums of Paris, immersing herself in the techniques of the Old Masters while nurturing an impulse to reframe female creativity within the language of traditional portraiture.
Muted palettes, sfumato surfaces, and atmospheric blurring lend her works a dreamlike quality, while her subjects radiate psychological intensity. Gaze, poise, and quiet defiance reclaim agency from the passive roles historically imposed on women. More often than not, her paintings pay tribute to women who opened doors before her: rebels of their time to whom she feels both grateful and indebted.
By collapsing temporal distance, Álava brings overlooked women, artists, writers, intellectuals into dialogue with canonical imagery, subtly unsettling the authority of the male gaze. Painting, for her, remains a critical and poetic medium: timeless and timely, responsive to its moment while reaching toward something eternal - that elusive quality of beauty and nature which resists language.
For Chechu Álava, the secret garden is not a physical place but an inner realm: a symbolic landscape where desire and loss, shadow and revelation, fragility and renewal coexist. It is, she writes, “an inner space… the secret depths of the soul. Desires, passions, shadows, sufferings and epiphanies. Its emotional climate is as changeable as nature itself. Entering it requires courage, but in return it gives you the feeling of living life to the full.” Painting becomes Alava’s way of approaching this hidden terrain, offering a reflection, however fleeting, of what cannot otherwise be spoken.
Earlier in 2025, Álava visited Charleston, the Sussex home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, where she was drawn most powerfully to the garden. Surrounded by its blaze of colour and rhythm of growth, she felt close to the atmosphere of female creativity that still permeates the walls and grounds of the house. Following Cob Gallery’s relocation to Bloomsbury, this encounter deepened her connection to the women of the Bloomsbury Group, figures who rejected Victorian constraints and carved out new ways of living and creating. For Álava, they embody the essence of her own project. Though her paintings presented in the exhibition are not direct likenesses, they pay homage to the spirit of rebellion, intellectual freedom, and radical intimacy that defined this community. Women like Vanessa Bell and her sister Virginia Woolf are transcended both foremothers, daughters, sisters and companions: kindred presences whose legacies shape a lineage of sisterhood across time.
Álava often describes inspiration as a process of becoming a channel—emptying herself so that something larger might flow through. She invokes the metaphor of the garden as a living painting—fertile, ever-changing, uniting art and life. Just as the garden at Charleston, designed and tended by members of the Bloomsbury Group, embodied a seamless dialogue between creativity, community, and environment, Álava’s own “gardens” of figures and forms operate as spaces of encounter, reflection, and renewal and a space where women past and present commune.
From the Garden of Eden to the hortus conclusus of Marian iconography, from Victorian bowers to Charleston’s wildflower beds, the garden has long been entwined with femininity. It has symbolised innocence and temptation, purity and enclosure, fertility and desire. At once cultivated and unruly, it has mirrored society’s projections of women.
Childhood (2025) evokes the mystical interiority of early experience. The figure is not the artist herself, yet she carries something of the girl Álava once was, already drawn to introspection and inward vision. Melancholy (after J.M. Cameron) (2025) reinterprets Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph of Julia Jackson, mother of Woolf and Bell. Rendered in hazy oil, the figure becomes an archetype of melancholy and absorption, akin to the devotional intensity of religious imagery. Themes of embodiment and sanctity surface in Fertility (2025), Álava’s first painting of a pregnant woman, undertaken more than a decade after the birth of her twin daughters. The figure carries echoes of Eve, Madonna, and Zurbarán’s female saints: rigid, luminous, both personal and archetypal. Desire (2025), based on a photograph by Oriane Robaldo, is presented as a collaboration, embodying longing in all its forms be it erotic, spiritual, creative another essential component of the secret garden.
The largest canvas, Sisterhood (2025), honours the artist’s closest friends, confidants of her inner life. Before them stands an ambiguous animal, whose role—as guardian or threat—shifts with the viewer’s gaze.
Bloomsbury’s presence resurfaces in The Source (2025), inspired by a fountain in Vanessa Bell’s garden at Charleston, symbolising origin and creativity. Letting Go (2025), based on Bell’s photograph of her daughter Angelica in a pond, echoes the figure of Ophelia while exploring cycles of death, release, and transformation. Rebirth (2025), a small but insistent canvas, embodies immersion, purification, and the courage to step forward. Nature itself becomes a confidant in Woman and Tree (2024), which reflects Álava’s communion with a century-old tree in Paris’s Buttes Chaumont Park. Here, rootedness and silent communication expand the boundaries of the secret garden to include the nonhuman world.
Together, these works form a personal yet collective narrative. They blend autobiography with archetype, individual memory with shared states of being. They suggest that, as Jung proposed, completeness requires a confrontation with one’s shadow—and that painting may be a means of approaching this encounter. The garden, too, can be read as a psychoanalytical space—an enclosure where unconscious desires, repressed memories, and archetypal figures take root. For Virginia Woolf, whose life intersected deeply with the rise of psychoanalysis, the garden and the river became parallel sites of introspection and dissolution: spaces of creation and refuge, but also of surrender, her final act of walking into water echoing the fluid thresholds between consciousness and oblivion.
In The Secret Garden, Álava’s figures are not portraits so much as presences: fragile yet insistent, ethereal yet enduring. They stand as companions across time opening doors to inner landscapes where art, memory, and desire converge.
The garden here is no longer Edenic, domestic, or ornamental. It is eternal: a metaphor for survival, mourning, creativity, and becoming. A place of radical intimacy and collective strength, where foremothers are remembered not as distant icons but as a living chorus offering resilience and hope to those who follow.
