The journey from his South African origins to the artist's community of Williamsburg , Brooklyn , where he now lives and works, has obviously been a fruitful  one for Kevin Connolly Gillespie, whose allegorical surrealism is included in the group show “Vivid Portrayals,” at Agora Gallery, 530 West 25th Street from June 26 through July 17. (Reception: Thursday, June 28, from 6 to 8 PM.)
 In the manner of Dali and Magritte, Gillespie employs a pristine, meticulous realism to imbue imaginative situations with a compelling verisimilitude. Landscape and the human figure are limned so convincingly that one accepts their anomalous aspects as factual representations of an existing world.
 Gillespie succeeds splendidly in his stated strategy to “externalize the internal” in paintings such as “Guardian,” where a slender, shadowy female nude appears to stroll down a stratospheric runway while luminous clouds fan out around her like enormous angel-wings.
 As a professional restorer of paintings, Roger Renard has learned to assimilate the methods of the Old Masters and apply them to his own subjective vision, creating a highly original synthesis of the classical technique and contemporary sensibility. Thus in Renard's painting “Psyché-délit,” for example, both the physical persona and the drug-induced visions of a young woman who appears to be a 1960s “flower child” inhabit the same sphere, just as earthly figures and religious apparitions frequently coexist in Renaissance paintings. In Renard's “Le Secret,” a pair of lissome female arms reaches out from a background of fractured Cubist planes to embrace the figures of three smaller French soldiers, posing as though for an old photograph, as one might mentally embrace a cherished memory.
 Although trained as an engineer, by dint of his own efforts Michael Hyman has acquired remarkable skills as a realist painter. He is also a sculptor and a photographer, and these disciplines also inform his paintings of female nudes. From sculpture he has obviously learned a great deal about volumes in space, which he employs to give the women in his paintings a palpable presence.  
 While Hyman's work is too personal to be termed “photorealism,” his figures possess a photographic naturalism that marks them as contemporary, coupled with strong contrasts between light and shadow that heighten the visual drama of compositions. And that Hyman juxtaposes his naturalistic nudes with esoteric symbols drawn from Judaism, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and even comic book imagery, lends his realism a potent post-Pop panache.
 The nudes of the Finnish artist Jarko emphasize painterly and tactile qualities that approximate in another manner the sensuality of his subjects. Jarko employs a variety of spontaneous techniques to capture a sense of immediacy that creates intriguing tensions between the actual and the representational elements in his art. For even while employing his skill in anatomy to bring his figures alive, Jarko often employs a monochromatic palette to undercut his realism in intriguing ways, as seen in the painting he calls “Let it Be,” where the artist's use of  silvery gray tonalities makes the statuesque nude almost appear as though she is fashioned from gleaming stainless steel.
 Souda Traore, an artist of African ancestry who was raised in Switzerland but returned to the continent as a teenager to study at the National Institute of Fine Arts in Mali , now lives and works in Boston . Still, she steeps herself in African culture and journeys imaginatively back to the time of ancient Egyptians. Combining pastels, inks, clay, sand, and other materials, Traore creates haunting facial reliefs of the great Pharaohs, as well as of various mythical beings in an innovative technique that transcends the boundaries between painting and sculpture.
One of Souda Traore's most remarkable artistic traits is her ability to incorporate a variety of timeless ethnographic motifs within the context of a subjective, innovative, and eminently contemporary style.