Raul Aguilar Canela
Crystalline

From Nov 7 to Dec 19 , 2026

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Crystalline, Raul Aguilar Canela’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring his most recent series of paintings. In these works, images hide beneath and within one another, creating multiple settings and realities at once. They ask to be decoded, but never quite resolve. Aguilar Canela’s work considers imagination in an age when images are everywhere, and when thinking itself is increasingly outsourced from our own minds into a collective one.

Images are observed, but they are also absorbed, lingering and resurfacing with the strange logic of dreams. This slippage between seeing, remembering and imagining gives the paintings their instability, while also pointing to our appetite for images: the desire to consume them, possess them and, eventually, surrender to them.

The title Crystalline suggests clarity, structure and order, but the paintings repeatedly frustrate this possibility. They move between entropy and negentropy, between our impulse to organize the visual world and its refusal to remain organized. Images overlap, categories fail, and meaning becomes fuzzy.

There is a sense of collapse running through the series: of categories, stable meaning, and perhaps even a shared reality. And yet Crystalline is also, very simply, about painting. Against the speed with which images now appear, circulate and disappear, painting remains a stubbornly slow way of making one. Aguilar Canela builds an image layer by layer, only to hide parts of it again, asking us to slow down, decode, and look again.

Raúl Aguilar Canela (b. 1988) is a Mexican-born artist based in Montreal. His work, bouncing between stylistic constraints and material explorations, reveals a particular interest in heterogeneity in the painting practice as well as a continuous infatuation towards the history of the discipline. He received his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond, VA) in 2021. He holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) in 2014. Aguilar Canela has participated in residency programs at Banff Centre and Est-Nord-Est. His recent solo exhibitions include Purple Vein at L’Oeil de Poisson (2024) in Quebec City, Puple Rain at Diagonale (2024), in Montreal, Smart like a Sun at Patel Brown (2024), in Toronto, and Please, no more motivated bastards (2025), at D.D.D.D., in NY. In 2019, his work was selected to be part of the Bienal de Pintura Rufino Tamayo XVIII, in México City.