Freight + Volume presents Cemetery Head, an exhibition of recent works by Mallorca-based artist Bel Fullana. Cemetery Head will be on view at 39 Lispenard St. opening October 18 with a reception from 6-8 pm and running through December 7, 2024. This is Fullana’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Known for her striking, brightly colored canvases, typically painted with a winsome flourish that mimics a child’s sense of logic and proportion, Cemetery Head, takes on more morose themes than she has tackled in the past. Yet the funereal atmosphere contained in these new works can’t undermine the essential joy and playfulness which animates her painting at its core. The carnivalesque, almost hieroglyphic character of her work remains unchanged. What she introduces for the first time here is a decidedly darker palette; many of these works are, if not painted black, at least have black backgrounds. Even in this respect, however, in the teeth of a most ponderous emptiness, the vibrant figures peopling her canvases provide a much needed respite from sorrow.

Fullana’s artistry translates separation and loss into picturesque memorials suffused with a sort of macabre comedy. In the work Burial, Sexy Sad (2024), a carefully crafted ambiguity ties together the storied symbolism pictured on the canvas. The totemic figure at the center of the picture holds a dog as well as a rose—each of which radiates a ghostly aura. In the overcast sky above, a skeletal moon gazes down at them, emanating its own sinister halo. The central figure, however, remains nothing but smiles: the effigy of a happy bikini-clad girl, digging a grave for her much beloved pet.

Fullana paints women generally as though they were symbols of some greater power; at other times with just enough nuanced detail that an individualized personality can emerge. In the canvas titled Cemetary Head, a central motif is the bridge of tears connecting the face of a woman to the likeness of a dog. The face of the woman, with its quasi-pockmarked, textured skin pops with more true-to-life reality than the dog, which has the stylized vagueness of a memory. As representation, the dog is already half-twisted into the shape of a heart, which indicates the kind of loving embrace the primary figure pictures him in. The details filling out the woman’s face, by contrast, work to make her visage appear almost too real, reflecting the burden of intense emotion.

Fullana’s work is able to express the tragedy of sudden loss through a visual lexicon she has been developing over the course of several years. Earmarked by winsomeness as much as sadness, Cemetery Head is a testament to painting’s unique ability to share our inner life in a way unparalleled by other media. Across the symbology Fullana puts forth—graffiti hearts, rainbows, roses—an almost heraldic meaning emerges: a whole cosmology, bookended by birth and death, describing events which inevitably end in joy if not consolation.