“Shapes of Surrealism” is a group show featuring Anabell Guerrero, Cynthia James, Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Pierre Roy-Camille, Karine Taïlamé, and Dora Vital, at Seimandi & Leprieur Art Gallery. This exhibition opened on March 5 and will remain on view through April 26, 2026. Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery is located at 33 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, California.
Some of the artists mentioned above have ties to the Caribbean. Born in Venezuela, Anabell Guerrero lives and works in Venezuela and France. Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine is from Martinique; he lives and works in Martinique, Paris, and Barbados. Pierre Roy-Camille was born in France and he grew up between Martinique and Paris. Karine Taïlamé and Dora Vital live and work in Martinique, where they were both born.
Description: Shapes of Surrealism is the current exhibition at SEIMANDI & LEPRIEUR Gallery in Santa Barbara. It explores surrealism as a shifting territory rather than a fixed definition, an unstable space where images emerge from instinct, illusion, memory, and dream, and where the familiar quietly slips into the strange.
This approach finds its most literal expression in the work of Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, the only artist in the exhibition to fully align with surrealism in its historical sense. Through automatic drawing and trance-like processes, his hybrid figures surface from the unconscious as black-and-white inner landscapes, a striking example of contemporary surreal art.
The work of Pierre Roy-Camille unfolds at the threshold between reality and imagination. Defining himself as an illusionist, he constructs images like mirages, where nothing is ever fully fixed and everything seems caught in a state of emergence or disappearance. In Grills, what initially appears almost photographic reveals, upon closer inspection, a meticulous hand-embroidered surface (an artisanal technique the artist learned in India), introducing doubt and instability into the act of looking.
With Cynthia James, strangeness takes the form of imagined vegetation where jungle and aquatic worlds merge, punctuated by the recurring presence of fluorescent jellyfish, luminous apparitions suspended between fascination and reverie.
Dream imagery resurfaces in Ultimes Limbes, a photographic series by Anabell Guerrero, created in the late 1980s, exploring transparency and feminine presence, as well as in Vésuve, a monumental work by Karine Taïlamé, presented here for the first time and born from fragments of memory rather than narrative. Recent drawings by Dora Vital extend this drift, allowing forms to overflow and recombine into images reminiscent of Rorschach stains.
Between surrealism in its strict sense and a broader feeling of unreality, the exhibition questions less a definition than a state of being, one shaped by illusion, the unconscious, and inner landscapes.
For more information, see https://www.seimandileprieur.com/artists/ricardo-ozier-lafontaine
@seimandileprieur
@ozierlafontainericardo
“Shapes of Surrealism” is a group show featuring Anabell Guerrero, Cynthia James, Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine, Pierre Roy-Camille, Karine Taïlamé, and Dora Vital, at Seimandi & Leprieur Art Gallery. This exhibition opened on March 5 and will remain on view through April 26, 2026. Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery is located at 33 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara,
