What is magical realism in art (and why it's not the same as surrealism) 🌙
It's one of the questions I get asked most often, usually phrased the other way around: "This is surrealism, isn't it?" And the answer, often, is not quite. My work lives right on the border between the two, between surrealism and magical realism, so I've spent years thinking about exactly where that line lies.
Let's try to draw it.
The difference in one sentence 〰️
Surrealism breaks reality. Magical realism bends it without breaking it.
In surrealism, the impossible is known to be impossible: a melting clock, a fish with legs, a balloon-animal floating where it shouldn't. The image alerts you that you are in another realm.
In magical realism, the impossible creeps in unannounced. A character ascends to the sky hanging laundry. No one in the scene is surprised. Magic doesn't break the rules of the world: it becomes just another rule, as normal as the rest.
That's the difference that really matters: not the image, but the reaction of those around it.
Where does the term magical realism come from? 📖
The name originated in Latin American literature—with authors of magical realism such as Gabriel García Márquez, Rulfo, Isabel Allende—but the term was coined earlier by a German art critic, Franz Roh, in 1925, to describe a painting that returned to the figurative after abstraction, but with a contained, silent estrangement:what he called Magic Realism, closely tied to the movement known as New Objectivity.
Magical realism in literature, my favorite genre and an example 📚
I say it without shame: it's my favorite literary genre. No other makes me laugh and dream at the same time, on the same page.
A perfect example, one that stays with you: in One Hundred Years of Solitude , a character ascends to heaven while hanging sheets out to dry in the sun. No one in the scene reacts. There's no scream, no explanation, no dramatic pause. The family goes about their business as if the strange thing were just another afternoon of laundry. That indifference is the magic of the genre: the astonishment falls on the reader, never on the characters. García Márquez would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for this very genre, in 1982, for a body of work built on exactly this.
Other authors of magical realism construct their own magical elements with the same ease: Isabel Allende and the domestic spirits of *The House of the Spirits* , Laura Esquivel and her * Like Water for Chocolate* , Juan Rulfo and his dead who continue to speak in * Pedro Páramo* as if death were merely an administrative detail. Other exponents of magical realism include the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, in *The Kingdom of This World *, who preferred to speak of "marvelous realism" rather than magical realism—a subtle distinction that critics continue to debate—and the Guatemalan Miguel Ángel Asturias, whose *Men of Maize * was among the first to bring indigenous myth into the modern novel.
Magical realism in painting 🎨
In painting, magical realism has its own distinct face. Frida Kahlo, whose self-portraits blend biography and symbolism without either being overbearing—a thorn in her neck, a monkey on her shoulder, treated with the same calm as a family portrait. Remedios Varo, who paints impossible laboratories with the same steady hand she would use to paint a kitchen—women weaving mist, domestic alchemists, all with the precision of a technical manual. Leonora Carrington, hybrid creatures treated with complete domestic naturalness—as if a being half woman, half bird were simply another neighbor in the building, a fantastic realism. The supernatural disguised as normality.
The term crossed the Atlantic in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York organized the exhibition "American Realists and Magic Realists" , consolidating magic realism as a category also in American visual arts, beyond its Germanic origin.
If you want to delve deeper into the sister territory, I've already talked about the great surrealists and pop surrealism , which is where both languages—the surrealist and the magical—intersect most often today.
How to recognize it when you see it: Magical realism in painting 🔍
Three questions I ask myself when faced with a work of art (the characteristics of magical realism):
Does the scene react? If something impossible happens and no one in the image seems to notice, it's magical realism. If the entire composition screams "this is impossible," it's surrealism.
Is there a realistic anchor? Magical realism almost always starts from a recognizable space: a house, a street, a body... to which a single crack of magic is added. Surrealism can do without the anchor altogether.
Does magic have an internal logic? In magical realism, the magical often has its own rules, almost domestic ones. In surrealism, the logic of dreams doesn't need justification.
Where I live on this border: Between magic and reality 🎈
When I paint a fish with orchids instead of scales, or a crocodile transformed into a helium balloon, I'm not completely breaking with reality: I leave the animal recognizable, the gesture recognizable, and I only change one thing. That single crack is what interests me more than a total rupture: the space between the magical and the real.
This is why my work is described as "between surrealism and magical realism," not one or the other. The Plastic Nature series lives there: real animals, real settings, and a single alteration that changes everything without being obvious; the concept maintains that spirit of magical realism.
The same thing happens in pieces that have nothing to do with animals, each with its own magical elements. In The Outcome , a hand pulls a rope that encircles a seated figure, but as you follow the arm down, there's no wrist. No one in the scene points out the impossible; the question hangs in the air, unresolved. In Homemade Thunder , a storm—something that should be immense, uncontrollable, external—is contained in a canning jar with its own label, like homemade jam. Inside, a little girl. No one asks for an explanation: the magic here has the silent logic of the pantry, not that of dreams.
In Searching for Wisdom , a man reads sitting on a pile of books the size of rocks, everything remains the same except the scale, and he continues reading as if nothing is wrong.
And in the Venus series, carnivorous plants occupy the place that Fragonard reserved for women in his idyllic gardens; the setting remains bucolic, recognizable; the only thing that changes is who inhabits it, and why.
In every case, the formula is the same: nothing screams that anything is wrong. Only one detail changes, and that detail is precisely what tests your perception of reality. Fantastic elements that blend into reality almost without us noticing.
When surrealism and magical realism coexist in the same work🌗
Herein lies the trap of clean labels: sometimes surrealism and magical realism do not compete for a work, they share it.
There are pieces where one part of the scene screams "this is impossible" (pure surrealism) while another part of the same composition behaves as if the strange were perfectly normal—pure magical realism. There's no need to choose sides. The same canvas can have one corner that breaks through reality and another that folds it without breaking it, and both coexist without asking permission.
It is, in fact, where I feel most comfortable working: at the exact point where it is no longer clear which of the two rules is in charge.
Why labels matters (a little) 🏷️
Not to classify for the sake of classifying. But because it changes how you see things.
When faced with a surrealist work, you look for the rupture: what shouldn't be there? When faced with a work of magical realism, you look for the crack: what detail, if removed, would make everything "normal" again?
That question, "What is the one thing that doesn't fit?" is the one I ask myself before finishing any piece, and sometimes even before starting it: The magical element that exists and the magic of not fitting together.
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