Wifredo Lam is, for me, one of the most significant artists of the modernist avant-garde, not least because his paintings dramatise and question the marvellous that Surrealists and Latin American novelists alike endeavour to capture in their work. His painting thrusts the conceptual and literal marvellous outwards, as twisted and problematic as it is thrilling and dynamic. Lam’s painting stands at the intersection of Cuban revolution, social oppression, postcolonial discourse, and Parisian radicalism. It can be read equally as an expression of Utopian (with Jamesonian capitalisation) and dystopian desires. 1945 – 1951.