Cossette Zeno: San Juan to Paris

Richard Saltoun Gallery is pleased to present Cossette Zeno: San Juan to Paris, an exhibition dedicated to the formative years of the Puerto Rican Surrealist artist Cossette Zeno. A significant yet overlooked figure within Caribbean and international Surrealism, Zeno developed a distinctive visual language during a pivotal five-year period, moving from the avant-garde circles of Puerto Rico to the centre of André Breton’s Surrealist movement in post-war Paris.

Born in Santo Domingo in 1930 and raised in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, Zeno began her artistic training at the University of Puerto Rico in 1950, where she studied under the Spanish Surrealist artist and intellectual Eugenio Fernández Granell. A key figure in the Caribbean avant-garde following his political exile, Granell introduced Zeno to the experimental possibilities of modernism and Surrealism, encouraging her departure from academic convention. Under his mentorship, she developed a practice rooted in abstraction, biomorphism, and the exploration of unconscious imagery.

Through Granell's mentorship, Zeno developed a practice that occupied a distinctive position between Caribbean modernism and the international Surrealist avant-garde. Her work from this period resists traditional figuration, instead unfolding through organic forms, asymmetrical structures, and enigmatic dreamlike environments. Drawing on the metaphysical spaces of Giorgio de Chirico and the atmospheric landscapes of Yves Tanguy, Zeno transformed Surrealist vocabularies into deeply personal explorations of proto-feminism, identity, memory, and psychic experience.

In 1953, recognising the significance of her work, Granell secured Zeno a postgraduate scholarship to Paris, where she entered the heart of the international Surrealist movement. While studying at the École du Louvre, she became part of the circle surrounding André Breton, Benjamin Péret, and other members of the group who gathered at the Café de la Place Blanche. Breton quickly recognised the originality of her practice, welcoming her into the movement and introducing her to Méret Oppenheim, with whom she formed a lasting artistic friendship.

The Paris period marked a decisive expansion of Zeno’s practice. Engaging with Surrealist theories of psychic automatism and the work of artists including Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Giorgio de Chirico, and Toyen, she developed a freer and more intuitive approach to image-making. Her biomorphic compositions dissolve boundaries between body, landscape, and imagination, engaging questions of femininity, selfhood, and transformation at a moment when such concerns remained largely absent from mainstream art discourse.

In December 1954, Zeno’s Parisian career was unexpectedly interrupted by her father’s illness, forcing her to leave Europe and return to the Americas. She relocated first to Havana and later to New York, bringing to a close one of the most concentrated periods of her artistic development.

The exhibition reunites works from this remarkable formative period for the first time in North America. It offers a focused examination of the artist's emergence within the transnational networks of Caribbean and European Surrealism revealing the originality of a practice shaped by cultural exchange and artistic experimentation. The exhibition, curated by Zeno's biographer, José Correa-Vigier, positions Zeno not as a peripheral figure but as an important voice within the history of twentieth-century Surrealism.