Jennifer Guidi, The Light of Water

For Jennifer Guidi, landscape is not something to be faithfully represented, but a mental space where experience, memory, and contemplation merge. Over the years, the American artist, a leading figure in contemporary abstraction, has developed an instantly recognizable language made of textured surfaces, luminous colors, and thousands of tiny marks that transform the canvas into an almost meditative space. With Waterfall, the new exhibition at the Gagosian in Paris, this research focuses on the theme of water as a natural and symbolic force. The new works take shape from real places visited and imagined landscapes. Beaches, mountains, oceans, and waterfalls are not depicted realistically, but are reduced to their essential structures until they become fields of energy crossed by light. At the center of many compositions, a sun or moon illuminates the scene, transforming the landscape into a vision suspended between observation of nature and the interior dimension. Guidi's painting is born from a process as rigorous as it is intuitive. Mixing sand and paint, the artist constructs dense surfaces upon which he intervenes with thousands of small incisions and brushstrokes. The result distantly recalls pointillism, but reinterprets it through a material that gives the paintings a strong physical presence. The pinks, oranges, purples, and yellows of the earth and sky intertwine with the blues and greens of the water in gradations that convey the ever-changing light and natural elements. Although moving within the realm of abstraction, Guidi maintains a direct relationship with the experience of landscape. His works do not so much invite us to recognize a specific place as to rediscover a shared sensation: a walk on the beach, a sunset, the roar of a waterfall, or the perception of one's own smallness in the face of nature. Waterfall thus confirms a research that uses painting as a perceptual experience, transforming the landscape into a space of contemplation rather than representation.