ART CITIES:Hong Kong-Jennifer Guidi

Developing an absolutely personal technique, through the use of sand on canvas, Jennifer Guidi breaks up the distinction between painting and sculpture, combining research on gesture and color to create two-dimensional sculptures in which light and texture penetrate the material to reveal tonal effects and designs.Guidi’s mandala-like compositions, and the richness of her palette increasingly link her mode of abstraction to sensory experience of the natural world.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Jennifer Guidi

Jennifer Guidi’s first solo exhibition in Asia, entitled “Heliocentric” at Gagosan Galley in Hong Kong, showcases 14 new sand paintings made in 2017-18. Six of the paintings are triangular, which is the first time Guidi has made shaped-paintings. Beginning with an underpainting, Guidi applies sand to the painted surface in a thick layer while still wet. Then, she makes marks in the sand with a wooden dowel, in controlled and repetitive movements, often adding colored sand and paint along the edges of the rounded divots until the pattern is embedded onto the canvas in the manner of sedimentation or erosion. Guidi always begins with a lacuna at a center point that is deliberately to the left of dead center, mimicking the position of the heart within the body, and continuing outward in a radiant, centrifugal motion, like light permeating a landscape at dawn. Every painting is methodically brought to a state of harmony by this systematic yet organic process, connecting Guidi’s painting practice to strains of Minimalism that privilege attention to detail and repetition. Guidi’s expressive technique also reveals strong affinities with various non-Western practices, in its intensely meditative pattern-making, used to create imagery, narrative, or spiritual votive. Jennifer Guidi was born in Redondo Beach and grew up moving between Southern California coastal communities and the desert oases of the Coachella Valley, her sense of color, light, and the physical and tactile emanations into which they play are based on her observations. The field of color spans from painting to painting, as well as within each individual one, radiating out of the gouges from light to dark, sometimes showing light within landscape-like forms, sometimes refracted as through the painting itself, ranging and varying like the light wavelengths produced by the concentration of particles in the atmosphere during sunrise and sunset.

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 7/F Pedder Building, 12 Pedder Street, Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 26/3-12/5/18, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com