ART CITIES: Los Angeles-Jennifer Guidi
Jennifer Guidi’s work draws on multiple artistic traditions, from the visionary Modernism of the American Southwest, process-driven Minimalism, the Light and Space movement, and lyrical forms of West Coast abstraction. She also engages with global art practices that emphasize intricate optical patterning. Her paintings evoke—and are informed by—meditative experiences of seeing, where the line between external reality and inner vision begins to dissolve.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Kordansky Gallery
In her newest exhibition “California Dreaming”, Jennifer Guidi invites us into an expansive re-visioning of landscape — one that is at once immersive, materially rich, and evocative of inner states of being. The horizontal format of each piece underscores a collective horizon, inviting the viewer into a sustained visual breath. Guidi doesn’t depict specific topographies, but rather conjures the feeling of landscape: mountains, sky, sea, light and reflection. In doing so, she transforms her canvases into kaleidoscopic essays on what it might mean to see in a Californian way. The works are defined by immersive layers of detail—thin washes, sand-infused grounds, countless micro-marks—which create a palpable material presence rooted in her past fifteen years of practice. The result is both visual and emotional: a dreamlike vocabulary enters her work alongside her established lexicon of abstraction and surface. Every painting in the show is horizontal in format — a deliberate constraint that amplifies the sense of horizon, of landscape stretched out, of time unfolding. Sizes vary: from large‐scale canvases to medium works, and even a single, tightly condensed small format piece. Guidi’s technique is immersive: she begins with a sand-mixed ground, then layers interlocking planes of colour and mark-making (including dots that evoke Impressionist and Pointillist methods) to build both depth and flatness simultaneously. Hills and mountains appear bedecked with countless tiny dots of paint, echoing the sand particles beneath and creating a shimmering optical surface. This accumulation of many small discrete elements becomes a total vision. The exhibition represents a full-circle moment for Guidi, who began her career working figuratively, then gradually stripped away references to the observed world in favour of abstract imagery. The show suggests those earlier aims and the current abstract vision were never fully apart. Drawing on inspirations as wide-ranging as the colour theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Guidi creates pictures of not only what can be seen but what it feels like to see. California, in Guidi’s rendering, becomes both setting and psyche. The sun-drenched hills, the shimmering sea, the wide horizon—they are not just geographies but metaphors for possibility, dreaming, longing. The title “California Dreaming “taps into the state’s mythic pull — the place of big dreams, big landscapes, big inward journeys. Guidi’s own childhood in the Californian desert informs this: the vastness of mountains, the immensity of sky, the desert’s material grit and stillness. This life experience weaves into her art, so these paintings are as much about internal terrain as external places. What makes this exhibition so compelling is how it shifts between outer and inner worlds. The large horizontal canvases act like windows onto the landscape — yet the landscape is also the terrain of the mind, the dream-state, the meditative gaze. They ask: How does the world appear when you collapse the boundary between seeing outward and seeing inward? What happens when the trickling dots of paint on a canvas become grains of sand underfoot? What happens when a mandala-like sun emerges on the horizon and reflects off the sea, suggesting that light can be everywhere, even within? (In her earlier work, mandalas often play the role of sun, moon, energy centre.)
Photo: Jennifer Guidi, We play together on your hills and peaks—one energy united, traversing the biome of your soul, deep into the center where we find only love, 2025, oil and sand on linen, 34 1/4 x 50 1/4 x 1 5/8 inches (87 x 127.6 x 4.1 cm), © Jennifer Guidi, Courtesy the artist and David Kordansky Gallery
Info: David Kordansky Gallery, 5130 W. Edgewood Pl., Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 7/11-13/12/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.davidkordanskygallery.com/
