The boundary between what we see and what we imagine has always been porous. In painting, the tension between realism and surrealism is not a contradiction – it is a conversation, one that has been accelerating across galleries and auction houses with striking momentum. René Magritte’s L’empire des lumières sold for $121 million at Christie’s in November 2024, setting a record for any surrealist work at auction. The following year, the V&A opened Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, a landmark examination of the surrealist designs that reshaped twentieth-century aesthetics. And in January 2026, the London Art Fair placed surrealism at the centre of its programme, with the National Trust lending works from its own collection to underscore the movement’s enduring cultural resonance.
What these events share is a recognition that realism and surrealism are not opposing forces. They are, increasingly, understood as two ends of a single spectrum – a spectrum along which a new generation of painters is working with extraordinary conviction. Four artists in particular – Dmitry Ginzburg, Jesús Leguizamo, Cristian Blanxer, and Philip Barlow – exemplify this convergence, each approaching it from a distinct angle and a distinct geography, yet arriving at a shared insight: that the most truthful depiction of reality often requires a departure from it.
Dmitry Ginzburg: Neo-Realism and the Architecture of Feeling
Israeli artist Dmitry Ginzburg operates at what has been termed neo-realism – a mode that takes the visual grammar of everyday life and quietly distorts it. His paintings depict figures in recognisable settings: a woman reclining, a couple in conversation, a solitary figure in a domestic interior. The settings are familiar, even banal. But there is always a dissonance, a subtle wrongness in the light or the composition that shifts the viewer from recognition to unease.
Ginzburg’s approach is not photographic. His brushwork is deliberate and textured, building surfaces that feel almost architectural. The human figures in his paintings are rendered with warmth and specificity, yet they seem to inhabit a slightly altered plane – as though the world around them has been rearranged by an unseen hand. In works such as Relax, the domestic scene is presented with such precision that its strangeness becomes more, not less, unsettling.
His 2023 virtual exhibition in Ruthin, Wales, revealed a parallel practice in digital painting, where enchanted forests and mythical landscapes extended his inquiry into the space between the real and the fantastical. Ginzburg’s art, in all its forms, insists that the everyday is never quite what it seems – that beneath the surface of ordinary life lies a layer of psychological depth that only the artist’s eye can expose.
Jesús Leguizamo: The Portraiture of Erasure
The Colombian painter Jesús Leguizamo begins with the human face and then systematically destroys it. His portraits are executed with expressive, confident brushwork – the anatomy is there, the structure is there – but the features are blurred, smeared, or obliterated entirely. The result is not abstraction. It is something more disquieting: a portrait that refuses to show you the person.
“I want to show the portrait of modernity,” Leguizamo has said. “I am interested in the materiality of the human body and its fragile image. In my paintings I represent the distortion, also alter the representation of the body; in this way, I use the expressive gesture of oil to deform the identity of the subjects.”
This statement, taken from his artist’s statement on Saatchi Art, reveals the philosophical stakes of his practice. Leguizamo is not merely experimenting with technique. He is interrogating what portraiture means in an age when identity is constantly constructed, performed, and dissolved. By erasing the face – the primary locus of recognition – he forces the viewer to engage with the body as a vessel of emotion rather than a signifier of individuality.
His works, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Colombia and at galleries in London and Vienna, occupy a space between realism and expressionism that defies easy categorisation. The subjects are recognisably human, yet their humanity is presented as something provisional, something that can be wiped away by a stroke of paint. It is surrealism not of the dream but of the erasure – a confrontation with the fragility of selfhood.
Cristian Blanxer: Where Portraits Become Landscapes
The Barcelona-based artist Cristian Blanxer works across canvas and wall, and his signature technique – what critics have called “multi-story” surrealistic portraits – fuses the human figure with architectural and natural environments. A face might contain within it a cityscape; a figure might dissolve into a hillside. The effect is not decorative. It is structural, suggesting that the self is not separate from its surroundings but embedded within them.
Blanxer, who studied fine arts in Barcelona and began his career as a freelance illustrator in 2008, brings an impressionist’s sensitivity to colour and light to what are fundamentally surrealist compositions. His brushwork is spontaneous and energetic, yet his control of colour is precise – the palette shifts from painting to painting, sometimes warm and saturated, sometimes cool and atmospheric, always in service of the emotional register of the work.
“The impressionist light and the poetical beat of the expressive stain define Blanxer’s creative rut,” notes his official biography. “Most of his works reproduce human actions, from ordinary to more surrealistic situations. Nevertheless, he seems to be as impartial as possible, letting the emotions arise freely.”
This impartiality is crucial. Blanxer does not impose a narrative on his subjects. He allows them to exist in a state of becoming – half-formed, half-dissolved, caught between the literal and the lyrical. His murals, commissioned by institutions including Berlin’s URBAN NATION Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, bring this sensibility to a monumental scale, transforming public spaces into sites of psychological encounter.
Philip Barlow: The Bokeh Effect and the Sublime in the Everyday
Philip Barlow’s paintings look like photographs taken by someone who forgot to focus. Headlights become soft-edged orbs of colour. Figures dissolve into pools of light. Urban landscapes shimmer and blur, as though viewed through a rain-streaked window or through the unfocused lens of a camera set to its widest aperture. This is the “bokeh” effect – a term borrowed from photography – and Barlow has made it the foundation of a body of work that is both technically remarkable and philosophically rich.
“The figures in the landscape serve as carriers and reflectors of the light that falls upon them,” Barlow has said. “Bathed in the luminosity, it is my hope that they would become more beautiful. To me, light is the ultimate subject because it embodies the pinnacle of all reality.”
This statement, shared by Galeries Bartoux, captures the core of Barlow’s project. He is not interested in blur as a stylistic flourish. He is interested in what blur reveals – the way light operates as a unifying force, dissolving the boundaries between objects, between figures, between the physical and the spiritual. His paintings, executed in oil on canvas, are painstakingly constructed from photographic references, yet they transcend photography by insisting on the primacy of the painterly surface.
Born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, in 1968, Barlow studied at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University before settling in the Western Cape. His work has been exhibited in London, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Singapore, Mykonos, and Montreal, and is held in collections including those of Bowman Gilfillan and Nando’s. In a 2025 Observer article on the resurgence of realist art, Barlow’s approach was cited as evidence that “realism is a plural movement, a territory with as many paths as there are artists who traverse it.”
A Spectrum, Not a Spectrum’s End
What unites these four artists is not a shared style but a shared conviction: that the boundary between the real and the surreal is not a wall but a membrane. Ginzburg distorts the domestic to reveal its psychological undertow. Leguizamo erases the face to expose the fragility of identity. Blanxer merges figure and landscape to suggest that selfhood is environmental. Barlow dissolves form into light to uncover a deeper, more spiritual reality.
The market has noticed. The art market’s embrace of both realist and surrealist work – from Magritte’s record-breaking auction result to the growing institutional interest in contemporary figurative painting – suggests that collectors and curators alike are drawn to art that operates in the space between categories. As Fine Art Connoisseur observed in 2024, covering the “Realism Now” exhibition in Barcelona: “Realism is a plural movement, a territory with as many paths as there are artists who traverse it.”
In an era dominated by digital imagery and algorithmic generation, the hand-painted, the textured, and the perceptually ambiguous carry a particular charge. These four artists – working from Israel, Colombia, Spain, and South Africa – remind us that the most compelling art does not choose between realism and surrealism. It inhabits the tension between them, and in doing so, reveals something about human experience that neither mode could achieve alone.
