In and through his paintings, Gbemileke Adekunle explores themes of solitude, heritage, physical and mental states of mind, struggle, resilience, meaning of life, and the human condition.

Born in 1991 in Ajilete, a village in southwestern Nigeria, Gbemileke's artistic journey was nurtured from a young age by his parents, who were passionate about art.

His art, characterized by its expressionist roots, with a tendency towards abstract expressionism in his more recent works, goes deep into the complexities of human emotions and experiences.

Browsing the Brussels Art Fair, I found this work by Pinchas Burstein aka Maryan S. Maryan. The pink color hooked me. A very particular pink: familiar, recognizable and, at the same time, rather scary.

Scary, but not aggressive.

Two pseudonyms: Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein) and Maryan S. Maryan (born Pinchas Burstein), two lives with lots of pain in them. Guston and Burstein both picked this peculiar pink to transform the pain within and outside them, as an eerie and deceitfully sedating outlet for emotional release.

In sunny Albufeira, on the Algarve coast of Portugal, Vanessa Barragão's studio stands as a welcoming, artistic stronghold of beauty, warmth, heritage and sustainability. Using ancestral techniques, Vanessa creates soft, cozy and colorful art using textile waste, which speaks about the importance of preserving traditional crafts and advocating for environmental consciousness through upcycling.

During her master's degree, Barragão created her first wool yarn collection entirely from discarded sheep's wool.  This was when her love for wool, nature and upcycling centuries-old textile techniques was born.

Оn the 20th-century art scene, few figures loom as provocatively as the Belgian surrealist René François Ghislain Magritte. His works, marked by juxtaposing the mundane with the surreal, are a curious and colorful inquiry into the nature of perception, reality, and representation.

This inquiry finds compelling expression in his 1928 masterpiece "Le Palais des Rideaux" (The Palace of Curtains). Painted during a stay in Paris, the melting pot of avant-garde art, "Le Palais des Rideaux" shows Magritte's ability to transform the familiar into vessels of profound ambiguity and allure.

Look into the tubes and, through them, into the world of Marco A. Castillo, an artist merging art with architecture and design.

Marco’s journey began with his involvement with Los Carpinteros. Formed in Havana in 1992, Los Carpinteros is a collective of Cuban artists, known for its critical engagement with social and political issues through a unique blend of humor and craftsmanship. Its founders, Marco Antonio Castillo Valdes (Marco A. Castillo), Dagoberto Rodriguez Sanchez, and Alexandre Arrechea, adopted a guild-like approach, renouncing individual authorship to highlight the collaborative nature of art.

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The wooden canvases of Gladys Bonnet (https://gladysbonnet.com/) are a portal to a world suspended between dreams and reality, memory and imagination, and the raw beauty of nature itself.

Her brushstrokes are a duel with the ephemeral, a struggle to pin down the fleeting shadows of her dreams and the elusive faces of her memories, not as a quest for perfection but as a perpetual trip back and forth into the unknown reaches of her own psyche.

Manoela Medeiros crosses the boundaries of artistic media, blurring the lines between painting, sculpture, performance, and installation, building a tricky relationship between space and time, the physical presence of the artwork and the person looking at it.

Defying easy definitions or categorizations, her creations challenge viewers to reconsider the essence of what they are observing. Is a painting merely a flat canvas, or a three-dimensional sculpture? Does an installation simply occupy space, or does it transform it? Medeiros thrives in this ambiguity, finding beauty in the transient and the undefined.

An Eye of the Mountain, The Guardian of the Cave, A Vertical River, A Lake of Wonders, A Glacier of Blood, The Facade of Fire: Gladys Bonnet uses painting as a diving platform to make a leap of faith into personal mythology.

Born in France in 1999, Bonnet is an artist who explores the nuances of consciousness, fears, the brittleness of existence and deeply intimate thoughts.

She opts for small, postage stamp or postcard-sized "portable" supports for her paintings, some as tiny as 2x2 cm. Painted in oil on wood, those are miniature pieces of art that you can carry with you: like reminders, like small recollections of past and future dreams, like projections of your innermost thoughts, meditations, reflections on the world around you and inside you.

Philip Guston's use of color was never arbitrary; each hue is laden with meaning, a mechanism for exploring themes of violence, identity, and the mundane.

Guston's pinks, often juxtaposed against stark blacks and somber greys, create a visual dissonance that forces viewers to confront the unsettling realities depicted in his paintings. This deliberate use of color is how he challenges perceptions, making approachable the familiar, the strange and the disturbing.