Anaïs Maar, Twilight Flower, 2025
Nil Gallery presents a group exhibition at CAN Art Ibiza 2025, featuring eight contemporary artists whose works explore the generative tension between chaos and harmony: Anaïs Maar, Simon Buret, Gommaar Gilliams, Philip Aguirre y Otegui, Malik Thomas, Matt Macken, and Valentin Fougeray.
Through a range of practices spanning painting, textile, drawing, sculpture, and photography, these artists reflect on the contradictions at the heart of human experience. Rather than oppose chaos and harmony, they reveal their interdependence—suggesting that instability and balance not only coexist, but actively fuel creativity.
Anaïs Maar merges figuration and abstraction to construct emotional, mythological worlds. Her self-referential, hybrid figures move through symbolic narratives of desire, violence, and transformation. Layered with archetypes and a personal bestiary, her lush compositions explore the friction between vulnerability and power.
Simon Buret brings an introspective sensibility to layered abstraction. His textured canvases, made with oil, grease pencil, and organic materials, oscillate between spontaneity and control. Through a poetic, almost spiritual visual language, he evokes states of fragility, balance, and quiet revelation.
Gommaar Gilliams constructs dreamlike scenes where memory and symbolism converge. His paintings—built from saturated dyes, oil, and delicate linework—blend abstraction with recurring motifs such as moons, hands, and animals. His art becomes a visual meditation on longing, introspection, and the passage of time.
Philip Aguirre y Otegui, known for his sculptural and graphic practice, presents a rare series of textile-based works. These pieces extend his longstanding exploration of displacement, dignity, and collective memory. Through fabric and fiber, he articulates a new, tactile form of storytelling—one that maintains his deeply humanistic ethos while embracing softness, layering, and material intimacy.
Malik Thomas reclaims textile and painting as intertwined practices. Infused with ritual and memory, his hand-dyed silk works reflect on masculinity, identity, and sacredness. With materials marked by fire, ash, and pigment, his compositions become acts of both resistance and healing—gestures that speak to intersectionality and cultural reclamation.
Matt Macken explores existential dualities through abstract-figurative paintings marked by bold color and fluid form. His canvases reveal the psychological tension between rationality and instinct, intellect and nature. Emotionally charged yet open to interpretation, his work invites the viewer into a shared space of uncertainty and introspection.
Valentin Fougeray approaches photography as a poetic and sculptural medium. Freed from traditional subject matter, his color-driven images open spaces of reverie and remembrance. With a visual language rooted in perception and affect, his work evokes fleeting emotion, memory, and the quiet beauty of impermanence.
Together, these artists form a chorus of sensibilities—each navigating disorder and structure through their chosen materials. At once personal and universal, their practices demonstrate how chaos and harmony can serve not as contradictions, but as complementary forces that shape the creative act—and our understanding of what it means to be human.
