The Portal to Dreams For art lovers who are seeking unbridled visionary painting, they need search no longer. The Portal to Dreams collects three contemporary artists whose visionary works defy easy definition as they craft personal revelations with a powerful, expressive force. This phenomenal selection of paintings confronts the viewer with poetic visual puzzles and graceful statements about the human subconscious.
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Júlia Fernández
 
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The psychologically evocative paintings of Spanish artist Julia Fernandez reflect a sophisticated understanding of the human psyche. Working in a contemporary surrealist style, Fernandez manipulates color, movement, and texture to create stirring subjects filled with meaning. With an obsessive attention to detail, Fernandez creates works that are dually realistic and dreamlike, rendered in imagined hues and fantastical settings. Dynamic movement plays a primary role in the overall mood of her works, incorporating images stretching up and out of the canvas, placing the paintings in a perpetual state of growth. Fernandez plays with ideas of time, place, and identity in her intriguing body of work. Her paintings are characterized by an overall sense of ambiguity and uncertainty. Here, things are not always what they seem: people, places, and things metamorphose and transform before the viewer, taking him on a mystical journey through the artist's own dreamscape.
Largely self taught, Julia Fernandez has enjoyed considerable acclaim throughout Spain and exhibits her work internationally.
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"Horizon Distant"
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"My World"
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Javier García Paniagua
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Painter Javier García Paniagua creates vibrantly ominous scenes, his transparent figures revealing the chaotic complexities of the worlds they live in. His festive colors belie the portentous narratives of his large acrylic paintings, which recall Albert Oehlen’s provocatively lush post German expressionist work. Paniagua paints vivacious shapes colliding with confused figures and bodies turning into technologically informed geometric abstractions. His figures often seem to be stuck within the painting’s frame, trying to move outward but not sure where to go. Amidst the intensity of his work, Paniagua maintains a tender, sincere sensitivity. The hyper-saturated worlds he depicts become tributes to the manic lives people live, the colors and shapes capturing the beauty of the natural world that persistently cushions people’s uncertainty.
One of seven children, Paniagua had a full, culturally rich childhood in Madrid which profoundly influenced the course of his art. He spent eight important years, from 1995 to 2003, developing his work in Patones and he has exhibited internationally. He currently live and works in Madrid.
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"The Recognition"
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"The Boy in Striped Pyjamas With His Family"
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Hagop Hagopian
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Hagop Hagopian’s delicate oil paintings on canvas are a delicious respite from an often-garish contemporary art scene. Infused with understated drama and elements of surrealism, Hagopian sensitively depicts textures of fabric, glass, and wood in still life, while a penchant for allegory finds its full expression in his intriguing outdoor scenes. Hagopian’s sprawling landscapes, executed in muted hues of warm grey, burnt sienna, and ochre, become the stage on which his imaginative, cryptic dramas unfold. Hagopian displays his precision brushwork through intricate rendering of line, as crisp branches of trees unfurl against the pale yellows of a parched, grassy hillside. Hagopian has previously worked in design and attended classes at Cairo Academy of Arts prior to being awarded an art scholarship in Paris.
Born in Egypt of Armenian descent, Hagopian has a long history of exhibitions, both local and abroad. His work has graced gallery walls from Armenia to Los Angeles, Paris and Moscow, achieving an abundance of critical praise along the way. Hagop Hagopian lives and works in Armenia.
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"The Attack"
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"Trees"
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Conor Walton
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Conor Walton's works reveal a deft mastery of technical skill as he takes on classical painting genres to give them a dark twist of modernity. His works at once pay homage to Old Master painting and the humanistic aesthetic, and give a nod to the evolution of painting since that time; viewing the works is a brilliant exercise in reading between the lines. Walton's most provocative pieces are his 'philosophical' works, which reveal the kind of clear perspective a painter can only attain from being on the edge of things, rather than at their center. That is, the works are executed with a self-referential quality, something Walton knowingly refers to as "a certain unavoidable level of irony and self-consciousness." He adds, however, "the idea of painting a microcosm, a compressed or metaphorical image of the world, complete on its own terms, is what interests me."
Walton was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied in the National College of Art and Design, from which he graduated in 1993 with a Joint Honors Degree in the History of Art and Fine Art (Painting). He has shown his work in exhibitions and Biennales across Europe and his paintings can be found in many private collections around the British Isles.
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"Still Life with Oranges"
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"The Threshold of Liberty"
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