Contemporary Painting and the New Cosmic Surrealism

Feature image: Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, El Misterio de La Noche (cropped), 2024,© Alejandro Piñeiro Bello via Pace Gallery

Contemporary painting has reentered a sustained dialogue with the cosmos. Early Surrealism turned toward dreams and the unconscious as structures of revelation. A new generation of artists extends that metaphysical inquiry to the celestial scale and planetary symbolism. The sky becomes psychological terrain. The sun functions as a sentient force. The body dissolves into atmosphere and reappears as architecture. This renewed cosmic surrealism reframes metaphysical ambition within a visual culture shaped by digital immersion, ecological anxiety, and global interconnectedness. Through chromatic intensity, spatial rupture, and symbolic transformation, contemporary artists construct environments in which cosmic space operates as an extension of consciousness.

The historical lineage of this tendency stretches across Symbolism, Surrealism, and metaphysical painting. Odilon Redon envisioned radiant suns and floating forms as manifestations of interior vision. Salvador Dalí destabilized horizon lines to expose psychic instability. Giorgio de Chirico converted architecture into philosophical stage sets. Today’s artists inherit these strategies and redirect them toward planetary consciousness. Rather than narrating dreams, they build spatial systems in which cosmic scale becomes emotional architecture. The result is painting that addresses existential magnitude through visual immersion.

Alejandro Piñeiro Bello was born in Havana and has developed a practice grounded in immersive chromatic systems and expansive landscape construction. His work has gained significant institutional attention, including presentation at the Rubell Museum, where Tormenta Solar was featured. The Rubells’ longstanding commitment to international contemporary painting situates Bello within a serious global discourse. He is also represented by Pace Gallery, a major international gallery with a history of supporting painters who push the medium toward scale and intensity. Bello is known for constructing vast environments in which natural elements transform into psychological forces.

In Tormenta Solar, a radiant solar disc dominates the horizon in concentric rings of saturated red, yellow, and electric blue. The landscape beneath appears liquefied and unstable. Rivers coil like charged currents. Vegetation curls in ornamental rhythms that echo the sky’s motion. Foreground and background collapse into a single vibrating field. The sun operates as a structural center and emotional catalyst. Solar imagery carries long-standing associations with illumination, divinity, and destruction. Bello converts that symbolic weight into atmospheric pressure. The painting reads as psychic weather rendered at planetary scale. The cosmos does not sit above the landscape. It permeates it. This integration of celestial force and earthly terrain reflects a contemporary expansion of surrealist space into ecological and emotional totality.

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Gongkan is a Bangkok-born artist whose practice has gained international visibility through exhibitions with Tang Contemporary Art and coverage from platforms such as Art Basel. He is widely recognized for a distinctive visual language in which simplified figures contain interior portals. His work explores themes of migration, displacement, emotional confinement, and psychological escape. Gongkan’s figures often appear smooth and monumental, stripped of surface detail, thereby intensifying the focus on the symbolic openings embedded within their bodies.

In Released from the Cage of Heart, two nearly identical figures face one another in a neutral space. Within each torso, a cavity opens into another world. In one body, a bird emerges from a cage into a field of blossoms. In the other, a branch extends toward open sky. The body functions as a container and threshold. The cosmic dimension does not unfold across a distant horizon. It resides within the chest. This interior expansion reframes surrealism’s fascination with hidden chambers. Gongkan replaces chaotic dream imagery with controlled symbolic geometry. Emotional release becomes architectural. The sky exists behind the sternum. Cosmic space becomes internal liberation. Through restraint and clarity, the work transforms the human form into a metaphysical landscape.

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Mac Baconai approaches cosmic imagery from a distinct position shaped by architecture and digital experimentation. Trained as an architect and operating a studio practice spanning design consultancy and speculative visual research, Baconai engages with esoteric astrology, occult symbolism, and AI-based image construction. His project, described as a mind academy, merges architectural thinking with metaphysical inquiry. He is known for constructing celestial compositions that blend graphic clarity with symbolic density.

In Hopeful Star, a radiant sun hovers above reflective water, its elongated rays extending like flames across a darkened sky. At the center of the star, a human face opens its mouth in a silent cry. Mountains anchor the horizon, while smaller stars punctuate the night. The composition recalls early cosmological diagrams in which celestial bodies possessed agency and personality. At the same time, the luminous surface and sharp contours reflect digital precision. The star becomes an anthropomorphic presence. The cosmos acts. Reflected in the water below, the solar form doubles itself, reinforcing the idea of mirroring between human expression and planetary force. Baconai’s work demonstrates that cosmic surrealism extends beyond traditional oil painting into technologically mediated image production. The metaphysical ambition remains constant even as tools evolve.

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This renewed cosmic orientation reflects a broader cultural condition. In an era defined by compressed digital feeds and algorithmic acceleration, artists construct immersive worlds that demand sustained attention. Celestial imagery offers a visual language capable of addressing vulnerability, hope, catastrophe, and transcendence within a single frame. Contemporary painting and image practice thus revive surrealism’s central question through expanded means. What lies beyond the visible horizon of the self? In this new cosmic field, the universe becomes both subject and mirror, restoring painting’s capacity to imagine scale equal to human interiority.

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