Blurred Visions at Feria Material
A global haze: paintings shimmering, softening, and quietly resisting spectacle at Feria Material 2026.
WINTER 2025
WORDS Rach Albright
Last week’s Feria Material in Mexico City gathered 76 exhibitors from 21 countries—an impressive sprawl of geographies, contexts, and intentions. The booths shifted languages every few steps. And yet, as I moved through the fair, a quieter continuity began to surface: paintings rendered in light-struck palettes, washed-out pastels, tones that felt sun-faded before they’d even dried, figures dissolving at the edges.
Across continents, artists seemed to be arriving at a similar softness, haziness; an ethereal register that resisted sharpness or spectacle. They shimmered instead of shouted. Whether by coincidence or collective mood, the effect was unmistakable: a global appetite for images that feel less fixed, more fugitive.
GALLERY Tütar, ARTIST Angela Maasalu, ARTWORK Jumping In
From Estonian gallery Tütar, one painting seemed to drift toward me before I’d fully registered it. Exploring contradictions of human experience, painter Angela Maasalu weaves together happiness and misfortune; the drama and comedy of life. There’s a fairy-tale logic at play, but not the saccharine kind; more the slightly uncanny shimmer where pleasure and peril share the same frame. In Jumping in, a nymph-like figure hovers mid-motion, suspended in an otherworldly glow that feels sourced from nowhere and everywhere at once. It’s whimsical, yes—but with enough tension beneath the surface to keep it from floating away.
GALLERY NOON Projects, ARTIST Michael Lombardo
At LA-based gallery NOON Projects, Michael Lombardo presented intimate studies of clothing and fabric rendered with such meticulous precision that, paradoxically, they begin to soften at a distance. Up close, every crease and fiber is accounted for; step back, and the image shimmers into near-abstraction. His worn garments and sun-touched textiles carry the quiet residue of the American West he grew up in. Through painted light, he captures sheen, fade, and weathering, turning everyday ephemera into something devotional. The effect is both exacting and atmospheric: realism that edges toward memory.
GALLERY Zalucky Contemporary, ARTIST Pardiss Amerian
GALLERY Zalucky Contemporary, ARTIST Pardiss Amerian
Further down, at Toronto’s Zalucky booth, Montreal-born Pardiss Amerian presented oil-on-linen works that felt both elemental and otherworldly. Abstraction and familiarity coexist without fully settling, creating images that feel discovered rather than constructed. Through a process rooted in intuitive exploration, Amerian builds spaces that suggest an elsewhere—landscapes that don’t map neatly onto geography so much as memory or dream.
GALLERY Galerie Nicolas Robert, ARTIST Raúl Aguilar Canela
GALLERY Galerie Nicolas Robert, ARTIST Raúl Aguilar Canela
Raúl Aguilar Canela’s work shown with the Montreal-based Galeria Nicolas Robert consider contemporary subjectivity through the language of success: productivity, acceleration, the polished optics of achievement. Yet the surfaces tell a different story; built slowly through layered oil and an accumulation of small, deliberate gestures, the works refuse the velocity they reference. What might read as sleek ambition up close softens into blur at a distance. The result feels quietly subversive: images of striving that won’t perform efficiently.
In a setting built for immediacy—for quick judgments, sharp takes, decisive sales—these paintings leaned toward atmosphere, toward glow, toward the kind of softness that asks you to stay a little longer. ❤
STORY CREDITS
WORDS Rach Albright, ART FAIR Feria Material
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