Norma Bessouet's painting merges certain Latin American strands of literary magic realism with Surrealism, But to call Bessouet a magical realist, as has been done, is to miss the inner ironies of her art, and, more fundamentally, its rebellious commitment to enigma. Her work transcends the clichéd limitations of these terms to enter into an all-encompassing realm, what André Breton once referred to as a veritable "Culture of the Surreal".

She is a classicist, for her vision is involved with the development of an ideal. Her art, however, is not regressive and does not retreat into the past; for her it is an eternal phenomenon like the ever-present and enduring mysteries of attraction, desire, love and eroticism which motivate human behavior and that provide her true inspiration. Governed by allusion and metaphor, Bessouet’s pictorial world is dedicated to making visible the invisible and she remains firmly committed to the practice of painting as a revelatory activity. There is an air of expectancy in each work, and virtually all of her images are striking in their pure simplicity. They evince a spartan neo-classic frugality, with no distracting supplementary motifs to detract from the central theme of engagement.

Her paintings, with their rich hues and enamel-like surfaces built from the careful application of layers of pigment and glaze, are elegiac in their evocation of the powerful world of imaginative play that is all too often repressed and abandoned as children mature. These frail, often androgynized, children are not the objects of an erotic imagination, but the subjects of a visionary world in which familiar objects and known places are merely the gateways to new realms of being.

Born in Argentina, schooled in Argentina and London and currently dividing her time between New York and Argentina, Bessouet’s work is in numerous private and public collections throughout the world.