Artist: Hulda Guzmán
Exhibition title: Lanza del Norte
Venue: Machete, Mexico City
Date: June 24 – September 4, 2015
Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Machete, Mexico City
Hulda Guzmán’s paintings are powerful, to say the least. Her point of view that of a Caribbean “Peeping tom” makes every painting look like a secret, a scene that was stolen from the characters or spaces she represents. None of the works reveal the presence of the artist, rather, it looks as if she hid herself behind the bushes to spy on moments that aren’t hers, but she appropriates them and makes them tangible and true thanks to the realistic power of her style.
She manages to transport the spectators to the point of bringing them into the scene. One can feel the music, the smells, the blades of grass in one’s body, the desire.
As if by a spell, one is suddenly “there”, next to Hulda, spying in complicity, passing the binoculars to one another, or sharing the reduced area of a hiding space.
They say an image is worth more than a thousand words, but in reality, it looks like no word nor the sum of all of them can precisely describe the subtlety of a decisive instant, what happens in the body when the time of an image transforms our personal time and our senses. Hulda’s images make us doubt our own reality and make us want to know how to get to that coastal territory (the setting of all the paintings in this show) that is full of magic, and where it seems like everything is possible. Only she holds the compass.
Affinités électives, 2015
Detrás de la pared, 2015
Dynamic relaxation, 2015
The seduction of the unenlightened, 2015
Tropical Malady, 2015
A necessary evil, 2015