36 DEPARTURES ARTSCAPE
36 DEPARTURES ARTSCAPE CULTURE Jennifer Guidi poses in front of Your Colors Are Eternal (Schiffermüller) (2019) in her LA studio The Power of the Palette A mindbending alchemy of radiant hues belies the deeper, more soulful and deliberate mood-altering effect of American painter Jennifer Guidi’s eye-catching artworks. by Lanie Goodman BRICA WILCOX
BRICA WILCOX “WE LIVE IN A RAINBOW OF CHAOS,” French artist Paul Cézanne famously wrote. Los Angeles-based artist Jennifer Guidi would tend to agree. “I describe my paintings as a journey because I’m never exactly sure how it’ll turn out from start to finish,” says the artist, who is as refreshingly instinctive as her paintings. Nothing is planned in advance. “One painting informs the next one, which is exciting,” she adds. This was particularly the case, the 51-year-old artist says, at one of her latest shows, a radiant, colour-charged exhibition called Mountain Range, which was held this past summer at Château La Coste, a winery that is also a hotel and sculpture park located deep in Cézanne country in Le Puy, Provence. The show’s unique setting – a cantilevered gallery built into a hillside overlooking the woods and flooded with dazzling light – was daunting at first, she acknowledges with a smile. “The Richard Rogers-designed building at Château La Coste is very long and narrow, with a glass door and a Guidi’s Miracles of Nature (2023), featuring sand, acrylic, oil and rocks on linen balcony that looks out on an amazing landscape. How can you compete with that? I broke the space in two and put the paintings in the middle, so you can experience the paintings along the way, get to the end and turn around again.” Guidi does not choose the word “experience” lightly. Interacting with architecture, space and how a room feels reflects the artist’s self-avowed desire to create a “magical connection”, not only with her subject but with the viewer. The slow-burning effect is powerful, almost hypnotic. Her work, which figures in permanent collections in major art museums in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco, has been labelled everything from “processoriented Minimalism” to “West Coast Abstraction” but you don’t have to be an art critic to perceive that Guidi’s textured rainbow canvases are more deeply complex than they may first appear. The layered combination of oil, sand, acrylic and rock is a process that the artist has been experimenting with for the past 10 years, mixing it together like cement and 37 DEPARTURES
