Villa Croce presented the first solo museum exhibition by the American artist Jennifer Guidi. ‘Visible Light / Luce Visibile’ was comprised of a new body of work investigating light, color and energy. The works in the show developed from Jennifer Guidi’s previous explorations of the painting surface and its texture through a personal practice of mark-making, reflecting on concepts of color and its lasting effects on the body and mind. Jennifer Guidi’s large canvases filled the rooms of the villa with saturated colors through abstract compositions that remind the viewer of oriental mandalas and, creating new forms of interaction between each vibrant tone of color and the space it inhabits, these works evoked articulated sensory experiences.
Jennifer Guidi began with a focus on figurative painting, depicting people, plants and other elements taken from photographs she made herself. Starting in 2012, her palette became more abstract. That same year, during a trip to Morocco in search of Berber rugs, she was impressed above all by the backs of the rugs, where the dense pattern of threads and knots creates tonal bas-reliefs. In the attempt to reproduce those abstract compositions on paper, Guidi found inspiration in the repetition of signs and the movements of the hands, leading to new works that have psychedelic and spiritual
overtones. Developing an absolutely personal technique, through the use of sand on canvas this artist 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.
The canvases presented at Villa Croce were painted in spectral colors evoking the tones of the rainbow, a form associated with light refraction, and were made by an initial layer of sand and acrylic medium distributed onto the canvas. In the damp surface, using specialized tools, hundreds of indentations were pushed into the sand mixture radiating from a center point and creating mandala-like forms with shadow and light. In some works, these indentations were filled with paint, while in others additional layers of color are added to the surface intensifying the optical effect and increasing the texture density. All the colors of these paintings derived from the full spectrum of light composed of the colors of the rainbow which is then distilled in separate tones affecting the viewer through the color combinations in each room. The formal rigor and procedure of these paintings, simultaneously archaic and futuristic, emerges intuitively, without any preliminary design, simply by repeating the same gesture in an automatic way, as in embroidery or in a mandala. For the artist, this becomes a sort of mantra, with a result that goes beyond the boundaries of objective reality to enter a meditative landscape.
A catalog published by Mousse Publishing will be presented in conjunction with the exhibition, featuring an interview between Guidi and Ali Subotnik as well as a critical text by Ilaria Bonacossa.
Courtesy Museo d'arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, Genova
