Alexa Guariglia

Moskowitz Bayse is pleased to present Curl Memory, an exhibition of recent paintings by Alexa Guariglia. Curl Memory is the artist’s seventh solo presentation with the gallery.

In her latest series of paintings, Alexa Guariglia replaces the improvisational brushwork of earlier bodies of work with meticulous all-over compositions that declare space and depth through pulsing repetition and intricately layered pigmentation. Composing in pencil prior to painting–a first for the artist at this scale–changes the sites of Guariglia’s spontaneity on the paper; the intuition happens early in the process, followed by a meditated deployment of color. Still, Guariglia’s real-time urge to resolve problems on the paper as they arise brings her synaptic impulse to the fore, as the paintings’ initial structure begins to liquefy under the dazzling and occasionally blurring hum of the crisp watercolor and gouache.

Curl Memory marks the latest iteration of Guariglia’s ongoing allegorical painting mode that finds her exploring life in the studio, womanhood, art historical lineages, and the visual cues shared by humor, elegance, and ornamentation. These new paintings, as considered as they are immediate, continue to suggest and depict the overlapping conditions of artistic practice in a moment of heightened public awareness of the interconnection between creator and artwork.

In Your Move, for example, one of the artist’s buoyant heroines reasons through six simultaneous chess matches against an unseen, perhaps nonexistent, opponent, as her patterned outfit melds into the background with optical alacrity. Mining her own daily practice and obliquely chronicling it in her paintings, the simultaneous chess match becomes both subject matter and conceptual key, offering a glancing commentary on her own newly reconsidered process. In Aim High, Guariglia’s almost-proxy takes delicate aim at some of art history’s iconic targets. Again, Guariglia’s wrestling with history, the self, and the formal properties of the line bring her paintings into a space where content and subject matter orbit one another, occasionally overlapping in flashes of personal commentary.

​​As part of a generation of female painters dealing with those intersections of history, the self, and the act of painting in the 21st century, Guariglia remains concerned with both the personal and the universal. Breadth gives way to specificity as the unidentified and abstracted subject becomes irreducible by way of a practice marked by a constant interplay between discursive poles. Couching deeply synthesized geometric abstraction within figurative painting, Guariglia travels within and outside the current moment, as her paintings invite readings distinctly outside their immediate subject matter.

Continuing the forays into tighter, more pre-measured paintings first hinted at in her last exhibition of large works, Guariglia asks the viewer to reconsider her own role in the work. Stepping back from the painterly ledge and finding solace in an enlarged visual gap between her hand and the viewer, Guariglia affords the latter a wider space in which to decipher her patterned, coded language. With every line, symbol, and interlocking network of brightly colored circuitry, that language becomes more readable and, as reliably as ever, more densely and poetically layered.