Massimo De Carlo Gallery is proud to present the first European exhibition by American artist Jennifer Guidi.

Radiant brings together fourteen new canvases of layered paint and sand in an exploration of gesture, pattern and texture. Intricate in their execution and ambiguous in their reading, Guidi’s paintings oscillate across a broad spectrum of association.

Beginning with a colourful under-painting or with raw linen, Guidi obscures this initial layer through the application of a cement-like mixture of sand, paint and acrylic polymers. While still wet, this sedimented exterior is then carefully manipulated by hand carved tools, teased and parted to reveal the base-layer beneath through hundreds of small indentations. In a few examples, the interior of the indentation is filled with oil paint. While others are continued to be layered with washes of paint and more sand.

This inquisitive and tactile process of revealing and concealing is first experienced through the five paintings in the ground floor gallery. Dark, almost clouded on approach, at closer range they gradually concede the presence of a wildly bright composition beneath the surface, submerged below perforated beds of black sand.

On the first and lower ground floors Guidi’s paintings expand on those blasts of shrouded colour, with whirlpools of rich, radiant hues. Simultaneously dynamic and laconic, luminous and taciturn, their composite texture engages the materially uncanny and a tangible physicality.

In Radiant, Guidi creates a playful yet insightful language through sensory stimulation. Her granular compositions, at once concentric and eccentric, encourage a breadth of interpretation and experience.