An artist from Spain has settled in Western Pennsylvania, where he crafts a reality on canvas that explores our wants and needs in a stunning and surreal dreamscape.
Through my work, I construct an invented world centered around two recurring figures, Piri the Dreamer and Flying Coyote.
Set within a garden space inhabited by otherworldly plants, flowers, and hybrid animals, the work explores ideas of rest, companionship, belonging, and the desire for spaces that feel emotionally open and safe.
Piri and Coyote function as companion anchor figures and partial self-portraits. Piri is always asleep, yet still active within the world, a dreamer in every sense. Coyote is playful and impish.
Both characters move between innocence and an underlying complexity. Together, they exist in an environment that sometimes feels like a narrative setting and other times more like a psychological landscape shaped by vulnerability and curiosity.
Piri the Dreamer and Flying Coyote in the Garden (in Good Company) #69 flashe on canvas
The imagery in my paintings often develops from medieval bestiaries, botanical illustrations, and historical sources that I repeatedly redraw until the forms become unfamiliar, exaggerated, or surprising.
Through repetition and transformation, these references slowly become part of my own visual library.
My process involves moving between digital and physical spaces. I sketch compositions on paper, build scenes in 3D modeling software, and then translate them into paintings using airbrush and spray guns.
The work exists in the tension between the physical presence of painting and the appearance of something digitally produced, inviting a dual visual experience between material surface and digital illusion.
Spanish artist Josias Figueirido has a new show at the ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh Aug. 15-Oct. 18.
At the center of my practice is a desire to create a world that generates its own imagery and has its own internal logic, allowing painting to become both a space of invention and a place of belonging. Rather than illustrating a fixed story, the world in the paintings continuously grows and changes. I see this world as a way of creating images that feel personally mine while remaining connected to the larger history of painting and image-making.
This exhibition at ZYNKA Gallery expands my ongoing exploration of the garden as an ever-evolving fictional world. Through this new body of work, I continued to develop a space centered around ideas of belonging, friendship, and refuge while introducing new environments, plant forms, and hybrid animals that broaden the possibilities of this landscape.
Installation of “Light of a Dream” exhibit at the ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh
A central focus of these works is the act of rest, both as a physical state and as a symbolic space for dreaming, reflection, and possibility.
Piri the Dreamer, depicted in these paintings lying down with closed eyes, embodies the tension between stillness and imagination.
Imagination requires spaces of stillness, and sleeping, dreaming, and resting become states through which imagination unfolds.
Beast of the Garden #77 flashe on canvas
Expanding beyond the canvas, new interactive elements extend these ideas into physical space, inviting viewers to experience the garden as a place that can be entered, explored, and shared.
Through these additions, this body of work continues to grow the mythology of the garden while exploring how imagined spaces can offer comfort, connection, and a sense of home.
Josias Figueirido’s “Light of a Dream” exhibit will be featured at the ZYNKA Gallery in Pittsburgh August 15 to October 18.
