Luis Guzman

Another Place

MAY - June 2023

Sitting in the middle of the studio, Luis Guzman had simply decided to paint exactly what he saw: the walls, the work table, the easel, the canvas, the painter... In a way, the simple reality. But even this simple reality, only remains "real" in its original state. Everything becomes fiction in a drawing or in a painting. The walls are different, the work table is different, the easel is different, the canvas are different… it’s just another place. 

Inevitably, the artist begins to wander and imagine alternate realities, and he plays with it in various ways, but curiously always projecting part of himself, some feeling or some idea. An alter ego allows him to move naturally in that fiction and it is perhaps precisely the fact that it is a fiction that allows him to express himself in a deeper and more subtle way.

By imagining other places, these begin to be created. During a visit to Colombia, Guzman recently discovered spaces very similar to the ones he had painted weeks before. Imagination is a creative process in all dimensions. Or perhaps, as the Corinthian myth of Kora suggests, painting seeks to capture what we love through its shadow; fixing the image somehow implies possession of what is imagined.

In this exhibition, the meaning of landscape is vast and important, and the interesting thing is that here landscape is not the genre of the paintings (they are mostly interior paintings) but is almost a character, symbolising a loss, a longing, or an ideal. A character who is sometimes more present precisely because of his absence. There is a lot of romanticism, a frank romanticism, bravely claimed among so much glamor and intellectualist sophistication. Typical ideas of this artistic style, such as melancholy, loneliness or silence, run through Guzman's paintings. We also find a certain insistence on the classical triad of the painter, the model and the artwork.