Magical Realism

HUGO GALERIE is pleased to present Magical Realism, a group exhibition inviting viewers to the space between dreams and reality. The genre emerged from the wreckage of World War I and artists’ desire to resurrect the enchantment they felt missing in its aftermath. Magical realism is an artistic perspective of reality that either adds or omits a key ingredient, beckoning the viewer into a labyrinth of possibilities, a skyline of maybes, a garden of perhaps.

Exhibiting artists’ work revels in what cannot be completely explained.

Beth Carter conjures epiphanies. She molds fact and fable, history and mysticism, allegory and lived experience into monuments of the human condition. The most revelatory aspect of Carter’s sculptures is not how deftly she compounds unfamiliar and even conflicting elements into a symbiotic form, but how her clay becomes a perfect mirror.

Marc Chalmé’s paintings are like memories. Figures and landscapes take shape on his canvases as light filters through a haze, creating the feeling of a recollection just beyond clarity’s grasp—perhaps the borders are clear, defined in captivating chiaroscuro, but the meaning remains cloudy.

Eric Roux-Fontaine applies layer after layer of splashy, intricate, mesmerizing reality until he nearly exhausts the concept. There is nothing innately dreamy about a theater, flock of birds, woodsy slope, or a tightrope walker—yet when they all meet on Roux-Fontaine’s canvas, the result is fantastical.

HUGO GALERIE is a fine art gallery in New York City specializing in contemporary figurative painting and sculpture. The gallery represents an international roster of artists working in a variety of media and range of genres. Please direct inquiries to info@hugogalerie.com.