Local Artists Showcase People and Places in Gallery Event

By Katy Keffer, staff writer

Accomplished artists and Restonites Margarita Reyes and Albert Halac hosted an opening reception at the Reston Community Center Hunters Woods on May 31 for “Places I Have Seen and Peoples I Have Met,” their latest gallery event. This inviting and moving collection of oil paintings is a probing study of life and identity—across cultures, landscapes, and people.

Reyes, born in Uruguay and the granddaughter of famous Uruguayan painter Pedro Figari, exudes graciousness, kindness, and a contagious energy for her art and the people around her. Halac grew up in Argentina and is a delightful storyteller, charming, and unpretentious. Together, this artistic duo’s magnetism mirrors the allure of their paintings.

The oil paintings fit in with the multicultural, international, and natural space that is Reston. With Reyes’s images of nature, flowers, and trees, she captures the soft mood of place. Fall into the quiet and open air of countryside in “Scene of Virginia” or the pleasure of a pause at a riverside Parisian café in another titled “Eiffel Tower,” which rises high in the background.

Halac’s paintings are commanding for their penetrating depictions across cultures and customs. Here, what stands out most are the eyes, hands, and precise poses of a people. His work represents the faces of daily living alongside messages of hope and prosperity, as seen in “Romanian Widow,” whose blue eyes pierce from the canvas. It’s also in the seated posture of a market seller whose gaze looks for customers in “Moroccan Chicken Peddler” where vivid orange, brown, and red of roosters and chickens pop off the canvas.

Reyes and Halac in front of Reyes' work at the display's opening reception. Photo by Katy Keffer

Reyes shared they had traveled much of the world—Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas—though one continent remained absent from their paintings. “We haven’t yet been to Australia,” she noted. Still, both artists continue to find daily pleasure in painting, affected deeply by current events and stories being revealed all around the world.

Notably, one of Halac’s major works he hoped to feature, “After Guernica, Gaza,”—a raw and vulnerable study of the war in Gaza—did not meet the Reston Community Center’s exhibit guidelines and was removed. To fill its void mere days before the exhibit opened, Halac painted a still-unnamed work to convey the “wholeness and spirit of the exhibition,” Halac shared. With striking shades of blue showing a night sky in peacetime and at war, hope persists despite heartache. He is inviting the public to visit the gallery, rest with the painting, and help title the piece.

The exhibit is free and open to the public with an opportunity to purchase any of the artwork on display. Visit Reston Community Center Hunters Woods at 2310 Colts Neck Road now through July 6.