Feel Like We’re Living in Surreal Times?

Javier Banegas 'Dream' oil on board, 150 x 150 cm

Pedro Campos 'Simply Delicious' oil on canvas, 114 x 162 cm

Pedro Campos’s still lifes have an air-tight precision, with cans of Coca-Cola, glass canisters filled with jellybeans, bottles of liquor, and coffee-table art books pictured on pristine and glossy countertops. One has the feeling of glimpsing inside the home of a meticulous minimalist with a sweet tooth and a penchant for an after-dinner drink. 

Javier Banegas 'Colour Shavings II' oil on board, 100 x 100 cm

Anyone who’s ever dabbled in painting or drawing knows that there’s a luxuriousness to the raw art materials themselves. Javier Banegas certainly does—the artist fills his canvases with pigment jars, art pencils, and canisters of ink that somehow manage to capture the chromatic density of the materials themselves—and could inspire any lapsed artist (especially anyone now at home) to start creating. 

Paul Cadden 'Guilin' pencil on paper, 37 x 53 cm

At first glance, one might mistake Paul Cadden’s detailed drawings for black-and-white photographs. His detailed images often have the journalistic feel of street photography, with cropped-in angles and a sense of daily motion. Only closer inspection reveals the images to be meticulously detailed pencil drawings.

Andres Castellanos 'Bahnhofstrasse' acrylic on canvas, 100 x 162 cm

Andres Castellanos’s panoramic street scenes are especially poignant, almost wistful, as cities around the globe impose quarantines, asking citizens to stay at home, and emptying out iconic plazas and intersections. Here, see life as it was just a few weeks ago, in scenes of New York, Paris, and London. The images are a soothing escape for those suffering from cabin fever. 

Alexandra Klimas 'Olivia the Cow' oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm

Dutch artist Alexandra Klimas is known for her large-scale portraits of farm animals, and mainly cows, animals which used to dot landscapes of Holland but are now rapidly disappearing from view as mega-farms forbid grazing. Her images imbue these creatures with a sense of personality and sweetness.