Points of Harmony
Jennifer Guidi
What if we ask ourselves in every moment of every hour of every day for the rest of our lives, “What would I love?” What if we allow ourselves the incredible gift of connecting with our truest and deepest desires?
What if we believe we are not just able or entitled to do so, but that we know that by granting ourselves this gift of connection that we make the world better. Better for ourselves, for our partners, for our children, for the planet. What if the space of art encourages and reinforces this notion? What if the artist by living fully and outwardly and inspiringly and generously shares this notion as an artist, a woman, a mother, a partner, a Yogi, a generator, a friend, a community member? What if paintings and sculptures and installations can become incantations, prayers, experiences? What if all things are not just what they are but are also more? What if the entire universe can be not just captured but encompassed both in the work of art and also in the experience of it? This is not just what I believe, but rather what I know. This is how I know Jen Guidi. This is how I know her work. This is how I am inspired. This is how I practice. This is how I learn. This is how I love. This is how I am. Amen.
—Heidi Zuckerman
The Artist
Jennifer Guidi was born in Redondo Beach, California, in 1972. She lives and works in Los Angeles.
Intricate in their execution and ambiguous in their reading, Jennifer Guidi’s paintings oscillate across a broad spectrum of association. Beginning with a colourful under-painting or with raw linen, Guidi obscures this initial layer through the application of a cement-like mixture of sand, paint and acrylic polymers. While still wet, this sedimented exterior is then carefully manipulated by hand carved tools, teased and parted to reveal the base-layer beneath through hundreds of small indentations.
Her work furthers Modernist histories of minimalism and spiritual abstraction, recalling perhaps Agnes Martin’s subtle geometric repetitions or Hilma af Klint’s seraphic forms and auratic color gradients: occult renderings that connect earthly material to aether. Guidi’s meditative process of developing compositional radial systems, in which “starting points” generate centrifugal mark-making force that often begin slightly left to represent the heart as an energy source, manifest loose, spherical circulatory systems of elliptic ovals, like blood coursing through veins and arteries, pinning meridian points.
Guidi’s work is included in prominent collections such as the Hammer Museum and the Rubell Family Collection among others.