FIRELEI BÁEZ WAS born in the Dominican Republic in 1981. She studied art in the USA, where she now lives and works. The South London Gallery (‘SLG’) in South London’s Peckham district is hosting her first solo exhibition in the UK. The show continues until the 8^th of September 2024. The exhibition is distributed between the main gallery building and a converted fire station, which is a few yards away.

The large exhibition space in the main building is occupied by a wonderful immersive installation. The viewer walks beneath a huge blue canopy with multiple small oval holes suspended from the ceiling. Light filters through the material of the canopy producing the effect of sunlight dappled by leaves of trees, creating the feeling that one is walking in a forest. Recordings of bird sounds enhance this illusion. On the walls of the room there are large, boldly coloured aluminium cut outs, representing silhouettes of Ciguapas – figures from the folklore of the Dominican Republic.  

In the converted former fire station, there are yet more works by Firelei Baez. On the ground floor, there are huge floor-to-ceiling, extremely colourful abstract paintings. The artist’s idea is to immerse the viewer in an excitingly vibrant sea of colours. The first floor has two galleries. In one, there are large, richly coloured silhouettes depicting Ciguapas. In the other, there are many pages from books, which the artist has transformed by overlaying parts of each of them with paint or ink. In doing this, she provides the viewer with alternative versions of what was originally on the page before she added her artwork. Although libraries and book-collectors might well object to extracting pages from books and then painting over them, the effects Firelei produced are both witty and attractive. In addition, they make you think twice about what was originally on the page.

For a north Londoner like me, Peckham seems to be a distant part of the world, but actually it is not to difficult to reach it by public transport. And many of the exhibitions we have viewed at SLG, including the one described above, makes the trip to Peckham well worth making.