New Surrealisms and Practices from the South
Imagination as Critical Territory
CAN Art Fair Madrid 2026
In its 10th anniversary edition — now under its renewed identity as CAN Art Fair — the Madrid fair consolidates its position as a dynamic platform for contemporary artistic discourse in Europe. For its third consecutive year, Isabel Croxatto Galería presents a focused selection of five Chilean artists whose practices expand the boundaries of painting and material investigation from the Global South.
Under the framework of New Surrealisms and Practices from the South, the gallery proposes imagination not as escapism, but as a critical method: a way of reading the fractures of the present through transformation, ambiguity, and symbolic density.
In the FOCO LATAM section, curated by Cristian Viveros-Fauné, Carolina Muñoz, and Nelson Hernández approach painting as a space of perceptual and conceptual tension. In Converted into Flower, Muñoz constructs a universe in which the body merges with vegetal forms, navigating vulnerability, sensuality, and psychic metamorphosis. Hernández, in Fever Dreams, destabilizes visual certainty through layered compositions shaped by digital processes and appropriation, capturing the simultaneity and fragmentation of a globalized culture. Together, their works reactivate surrealism not as historical quotation, but as a contemporary sensitivity attuned to instability and the collapse of fixed meaning.
In the GALERÍAS section, Mara Faúndez, Joaquín Reyes, and Vicente Prieto Gaggero extend this dialogue through distinct yet interconnected material explorations. Faúndez constructs intimate narrative scenes charged with chromatic intensity, where memory and desire unfold within spaces suspended between the familiar and the imagined. Reyes develops a rigorous pictorial system rooted in repetition and frontal structure, in which gesture becomes method, and the image resists illusionistic depth. Prieto Gaggero’s ceramic sculptures investigate the body as an architectural and posthuman territory, articulating tensions between organic matter and contemporary urban existence.
Together, these five artists position the Global South as an active field of symbolic production — a space where painting and materiality operate as forms of resistance, inquiry, and poetic reconfiguration of the real.
With the support of the Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Heritage of Chile, Isabel Croxatto Galería continues to strengthen the international projection of Chilean contemporary art.
Madrid, March 2026
