Gonzalo Endara Crow (1936-1996) was greatly inspired by Ecuador’s highly skilled indigenous artisans and the brilliant colors represented in their fine pottery and textiles. In the late 1980s, he gained significant prominence among Latin American artists in the New York auction scene. Various art historians and critics have referred to his work as magical realism, a term often used when speaking of twentieth-century Latin American literature. Magical realism in painting can be distinguished by the way in which reality and fantasy are blended. As in the magical realist texts of Gabriel García Márquez, Gonzalo Endara Crow's paintings weave in fantastic elements with deadpan presentation transforming the unlikely into certain reality with a subtle mechanism: the treatment of light.