HUGO GALERIE is pleased to present Winter Collective I, the first of this season’s two group exhibitions. Though many of the artists participating in Winter Collective I are familiar to HUGO, their work is not. All artists are showing either entirely new collections or pieces never-before-seen in New York City. And for two artists, this exhibition will be their debut with the gallery. HUGO welcomes friends new and old to join us for this exciting start to 2019. Bonne année!

Joseph Adolphe’s large canvases show the delicate side of a bull and the formidable angle of a flower; these incongruous qualities recall the tug-of-war between universal forces that exist within nature and ourselves. Elizabeth Allison creates dreamy, drippy watercolors that come into clarity upon realizing they are not mere scenes but feelings. Like dusk and dawn, Marc Chalmé’s paintings are mysterious spaces as evocative as they are enthralling. Marc Dailly captures the strangeness of the everyday in overlooked moments—not the party but its aftermath, not a family posing but mid-meal, not a home perfectly prepared for guests but slightly unkempt with a lone resident doing something utterly normal off-center.

Laurent Dauptain is a master of portraiture; whether of the self or flowers, his painterly portraits are deft compilations of what is seen and unseen. Federico Infante’s hazy dreamscapes are both otherworldly and disarmingly familiar, their realism so accurate it conjures déjà vu. Philippe Charles Jacquet is an architectural painter; he plans his landscapes and their structures with geometric precision, building them in a layered variety of media and methods until they are as real as they are imagined. The heavily textured sculptures of Joseph Paxton are so stylized yet alive, so substantial yet nimble, so personal yet conceptual, it is impossible to say whether they are individual animals or archetypal totems. Eric Roux-Fontaine’s verve is palpable in his mystical compositions that encourage the potential found only in our dreams. Brian Keith Stephens can barely contain the exuberant emotions of his canvases; quirky characters parade and color splashes in ways that speak of the uncurtailed human experience and remind us to participate.