DEPARTURES CULTURE ARTSCAPE “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 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 64 Guidi’s Miracles of Nature (2023), featuring sand, acrylic, oil and rocks on linen BRICA WILCOX
FRÉDÉRIC DESIMONI (2) “I started out as a figurative painter and that was where I really learned how to see” An installation view of Guidi’s Mountain Range exhibition at Château La Coste this past summer, with Morning Wrapped Land Aglow (2023) in the foreground then trowelling it on. Alongside her play with colour and composition, inspired by Tibetan sand mandalas, are poetic titles like Dreams Stretched along the Roof of the World or All of Life Fell Across the Sky. “My titles are usually long because I’m always taking notes from books I happen to be reading on spirituality or philosophy,” explains Guidi. Unsurprisingly, meditation is part of her daily routine – and an important part of her creative process. She also finds inspiration in nature: “I live close to Griffith Park, so it’s easy to dip into a little pocket of nature. That’s the nice part of LA: you don’t have to go very far to feel like you’re in the woods or the desert.” In her studio, she works to the pulsating rhythms of contemporary hip-hop but also has a stack of revered modern masters – Bonnard, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gauguin – on her night table. Born in Redondo Beach, California, Guidi attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she learned “a traditional approach” that has guided her ever since. A glimpse inside Richard Rogers’s cantilevered Drawing Gallery, Guidi’s Dreams Stretched Along the Roof of the World (2023) front and centre “I started out as a figurative painter and that was where I really learned how to see,” the artist says. It has taken a while to come “full circle” from the style of her first 2005 show in a small LA gallery to now. “My work used to be more photorealistic, even if it was still based in colour, light and form,” explains Guidi. “Then, over the years, I tried to empty out what I saw and record an image from the inside. It was important to get to that place to make an abstract painting. And now it’s back to landscapes.” 65 DEPARTURES
