In her new body of work, Guidi focuses on the symbolism of the landscape. Her signature high-key palette of sherbet yellow, vermillion red, tyrian purple, dianthus pink, and lapis blue radiate from her body-size canvases, playing tricks on the optic nerve as layers of complimentary dot gradients flicker over monochrome grounds.
Titles like With a Magnetizing Force I Pulled the Sky Over Me and A Stillness Spread Over the Sea offer poetic phrases as if pulled from Beat generation poet Gary Snyder’s nature poems, offering a cartography for ways of seeing.
In the monumental The Long Burnished Sun-Glade Waters (2024–2025; sand, acrylic and oil on linen; 72 x 108 inches) we are given a hawk’s perspective of a surf break meeting the shore as an orb of sunset glows centrally at the horizon line of sea. It could very well be a lookout point along the California or Italian coastline, but it is also a pastiche of the very idea of landscape painting. Guidi’s fascination with mountain and sea calls to mind a conclave of fellow landscape painters who, through the act of repetition, come close to something that resembles mantra: Katsushika Hokusai, the Edo-period painter known for his thirty-six views of Mount Fuji woodblock print series; J.W.M. Turner and his ecstatic, Romantic sunset paintings; the Lebanese poet-painter Etel Adnan and her hundreds of paintings of Mount Tam throughout the seasons.
And yet while Guidi’s landscapes are allegorical, their constituent parts come from the very real world. Guidi is a lifelong hiker and explorer of the American west, and the cadmium yellows of autumn aspen and jagged peaks of basalt come from her lived experience of noticing and looking in the natural world. Guidi’s collection of geological specimens installed in the gallery bookshelves reference the array of marbles used by its architect Piero Portaluppi – a nod to the Milanese tradition of embellishment with stone and a play with the domestic grandeur of the original design, like the turquoise amazonite mantle of the main gallery. Her wunderkammer in the context of the gallery –a former house– blends the schism Walter Benjamin describes as the “cult value” of art, which emphasizes its uniqueness and ritualistic function, versus its “exhibition value,” which prioritizes its catholic appeal.
These surfaces never stay still. The texture of these paintings looks like rustic, unglazed clay bumpy with grog, but the oil paint application is refined, layered, and exquisitely detailed, a technique such that the surfaces seem to vibrate and shimmer the longer they are beheld. In Draped in the Warmth of Dawn (2024; acrylic, oil and rocks on linen; 76 x 58 inches), the thick surface of sand is applied with a trowel then punched in with a dowel in radiating indentations so deep they cast shadows; each divot animates the surface of the paintings like hundreds of sundials as the light shifts throughout the day. Guidi’s mark-making becomes a form of time-keeping if one stays present long enough to notice– another way Guidi invites the viewer across the boundary of the present, real world and into a place of imagination, fantasy, and pleasure.
—Lily Stockman
at MASSIMODECARLO, Milan
until May 24, 2025
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