Jennifer Guidi: Heliocentric

This vibrant monograph commemorates Jennifer Guidi's first exhibition with Gagosian and her first in Asia.

Jennifer Guidi's "sand paintings" mix oil paint with sand to create surfaces of color and texture. Evolving from her earlier figurative works, these abstract sand paintings evoke the traditions of landscape and naturalist painting. Accomplished by applying a thick layer of sand to the painted ground and then making precise marks while the sand is still wet, the paintings' luminous qualities and their textured relief register and generate minute shifts in perception, creating their own sense of ambient light. These physical and tactile emanations are based on her observations of light in Los Angeles, where she lives and works, and where hazy skies caused by the atmospheric conditions of the West Coast, as well as the city's man-made pollution, make for extra-brilliant sunsets.

The fourteen paintings in the exhibition also include Guidi's first triangular-shaped canvases, in a spectrum of colors, placing the organic accumulations of paint and sand within a sharp geometry.

Stuart Krimko is a poet, art writer, translator, and astrologer.