04/09/2026
Installation view of Shapes of Surrealism at Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery in Santa Barbara.
Shapes of Surrealism brings together works by Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Pierre Roy-Camille, Cynthia James, Karine Taïlamé, Annabel Guerrero, and Dora Vital.
Shapes of Surrealism explores surrealism as a shifting territory rather than a fixed definition, an unstable space where images emerge from instinct, illusion, memory, and dream, and where the familiar quietly slips into the strange.
This approach finds its most literal expression in the work of Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, the only artist in the exhibition to fully align with surrealism in its historical sense. Through automatic drawing and trance-like processes, his hybrid figures surface from the unconscious as black-and-white inner landscapes.
The work of Pierre Roy-Camille unfolds at the threshold between reality and imagination. Defining himself as an illusionist, he constructs images like mirages, where nothing is ever fully fixed and everything seems caught in a state of emergence or disappearance. In Grills, what initially appears almost photographic reveals, upon closer inspection, a meticulous hand-embroidered surface (an artisanal technique the artist learned in India) introducing doubt and instability into the act of looking.
With Cynthia James, strangeness takes the form of imagined vegetation where jungle and aquatic worlds merge, punctuated by the recurring presence of fluorescent jellyfish, luminous apparitions suspended between fascination and reverie.
Dream imagery resurfaces in Ultimes Limbes, a photographic series by Annabel Guerrero created in the late 1980s, exploring transparency and feminine presence, as well as in Vésuve, a monumental work by Karine Taïlamé, presented here for the first time and born from fragments of memory rather than narrative. Recent drawings by Dora Vital extend this drift, allowing forms to overflow and recombine into images reminiscent of Rorschach stains.
Between surrealism in its strict sense and a broader feeling of unreality, the exhibition questions less a definition than a state of being, one shaped by illusion, the unconscious, and inner landscapes.
