Wifredo Lam’s spiritual surrealism, told by his son

Wifredo Lam moved between worlds: the Surrealist circles of 1930s Paris, where he encountered André Breton and the movement’s visionary urgency, and the Caribbean he returned to in 1941, carrying those European influences like seeds planted in unfamiliar soil. What germinated was entirely his own. Rather than simply adopting the Surrealists’ techniques of automatism and dream logic, Lam found in Afro Cuban spiritual customs and religious practice a different pathway to the unconscious, one rooted in his native culture and its profound, layered histories.

His son Eskil speaks to this dual inheritance with the clarity of someone who understood his father’s vision from within. Ogue Orisa, painted in 1943, embodies this synthesis with luminous precision. The canvas glows with spectral forms, pale ochres and greens drifting across cream ground, touches of coral and blue suggesting ritual and reverence. Lam’s line moves with the fluidity of something summoned rather than invented, as though the painting itself were an act of spiritual communion, a visual incantation drawing on the orishas and the mythologies of the Caribbean.

The work challenges the European claim on Surrealism itself, insisting that the gateway to the fantastical need not begin in Paris. Lam’s contribution fundamentally recast what Surrealism could mean: not mere escapism or formal experiment, but a reclamation of knowledge suppressed, a return to forms of consciousness and expression that colonialism had tried to erase. Through his lens, the spiritual became revolutionary, and the unconscious itself became a space where Afro Caribbean culture could be honoured and reclaimed.

Christie’s 20th Century Evening Sale in New York on 17 November will offer Ogue Orisa, allowing collectors to engage with this pivotal moment in twentieth century art, when a Cuban artist working between continents transformed the very language of modernism.

Imagery courtesy of Christie's (@christiesinc).