HUGO ALONSO, KIM SIMONSSON

Here, Hugo Alonso’s paintings and Kim Simonsson’s sculptures unfold in a space where reality and fiction blur, and nature becomes a stage for philosophical and sensory reverie. Together, their works explore our relationship to what we see, to childhood, and to the experience of wonder. At the crossroads of forest and imagination, this encounter conjures dreamlike worlds populated by enigmatic presences. The forest — a recurring motif in both artists’ work — becomes a shared playground: an elusive refuge in Hugo Alonso’s misty landscapes and a home to Kim Simonsson’s Moss People. For both, nature is not just scenery but a living, mysterious being — both nurturing and unsettling.

Kim Simonsson (Finland, 1974) crafts fantastical figures — part child, part spirit — inspired by Nordic folklore and his own imagined mythologies: the Moss People. Clad in cabbage-leaf tunics, sheltered under mossy canopies, and crowned with flowers, they seem to step straight out of a dream, from a world where every object brims with symbolism. His “golden seed,” for instance, stands as a promise of renewal — a return to innocence, carrying the wisdom of ancient simplicity.

Meanwhile, Hugo Alonso (Spain, 1981) cloaks our gaze in mist. Through vaporous, airbrushed landscapes, he doesn’t depict so much as suggest. Viewers are invited to reconstruct what they see, and to imagine what lies just out of frame, to feel the atmosphere that hovers in his haunting scenes. His work evokes a Kantian sense of the sublime — landscapes not as documentary records, but as emotional experiences, like cinematic shots reinterpreting reality.

Rooted in childhood fairytales and the philosophical musings of Kant and Hesse, both artists ultimately ask the same question: what remains of our sense of wonder in the world? Their works respond not with certainty, but with evocations of mystery, marvel, and ambiguity — elements that don’t fix reality, but instead open it up as a playground for the imagination. This exhibition is an invitation to wander through the mist of a reenchanted world, where the lines between reality and fiction blur, and where childhood and nature become fertile ground for transformation.