Alexa Guariglia

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Viewing Room

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Are You Decent?, an exhibition of new paintings by Alexa Guariglia, marking the artist’s eighth with the gallery.

As the immediate follow-up to her previous body of work, exhibited just before the shutdown in New York, Guariglia deepens her exploration of activated bodies and the equation of physical and psychological space. Tightening her marks and compositions while temporarily turning away from color, Guariglia’s new pictures suggest a reaction to that last series’ painterly, nearly expressionistic turn.

Extending her engagement with line and form as drivers of both composition and content, the artist’s typically energetic world turns serene and meditative as figures occupy and define rhythmic, ornamented interiors; her subjects bathe, organize, exercise, build, and sculpt with uniform fluidity. Tonal shades of black ink lend depth and weight to body and room alike, often casting the figures as both captives and actuators of their respective spaces. For the first time in her career, Guariglia composes the pictures with pencil first, before applying ink, resulting in sharpened lines and a heightened sense of rounded space.

Bifurcations of a single female archetype–perhaps an abbreviated self-portrait–Guariglia’s women share mannerisms, clothing (and nakedness) and a general appearance. Still, they avoid individual characterization. Their existence in the artist’s sprawling painted universe is tempered by the felt autonomy of their own discrete realms, where hermetic action overrules continuous narrative. The luthier has crafted instruments since the beginning of time and will remain doing so; the sculptor plies her trade with equal resolve. Are they aware of one another?

Running Archive articulates this relationship between individual paintings and Guariglia’s larger oeuvre. The figure frantically grabs paintings as they reach the end of a series of treadmills, carefully organizing them into files each demarcated by a single year and filled with work from that year, when applicable. So increasingly specialized are the dendrites of Guariglia’s hyper-meta practice that an archivist must be created and employed to keep track of its constant widening through fractalized self-reference. Through Guariglia’s bidirectional inward-outward march, figures and subjects become self-generating, the result of a practice that necessitates its own continuation and, in the archivist’s case, maintenance.