Deep in the Dominican rainforest, high up on a mountain, miles from anywhere, Hulda Guzmán stares at an endless expanse of jungle. From her modernist wooden studio, built by her architect father Eddie, she looks out into the vast greenness of her world, the deep blues of the ocean in the distance, the warm oranges and yellows of the sky, and she feels peace. She feels a sense of oneness with nature.
It’s a kind of spiritual positivity that’s a little hard to empathise with when you’re under the leaden skies of the UK, but if you lose yourself in Guzmán’s psychedelic Caribbean landscape painting you can almost be transported to the tropics. The young Dominican artist’s paintings here in her first institutional show in Europe are ultra-colourful jungle reveries, filled with allusions to art history and mythical beings.
The first room puts you inside her studio, giving you windows into the jungle from within her private world. Demons from Japanese ukiyo-e prints torture Guzman as she lies in bed, two lizards eye each other up on a window sill, spirits seem to leap out of cups, ghosts appear as floating orbs, angels visit a bathing mermaid, and everywhere you look the jungle is encroaching on the world – it reaches through windows, smashes through roofs. It’s all mythological and magical, a symbolist freakout in the rainforest, with nods to Jungian psychoanalysis woven through it.
They’re pretty paintings, but a bit laboured and indulgent. Guzmán is way better out in nature, where the landscape becomes the main character, where the jungle explodes into life. Enormous trees reach into the skies, foliage and fronds wrap themselves across the paintings, fireflies dance in the night. At points the jungle is so rich and dense it becomes almost abstract. One work is just a fog of blues and greens, a miasma of jungle tones. There are still figures here but they’re smaller, they’re living in the landscape, not dominating it. They swim in the sea, walk through the garden, lie naked in nature.
They’re mainly Guzmán, living her life in this beautiful place. In one image she speeds past on a motorbike, transporting a palm tree to be planted. In another she waters plants surrounded by her family and those demons again, but this time they’ve been accepted, they’re a part of this universe, not forces of evil trying to destroy it.
The sense you get throughout these works is of total abandon in the present, of Guzmán losing herself in her environment. Faced with ecological collapse, rising sea levels and deforestation, these paintings are celebrations of nature and its immediate, tangible beauty. Her art is almost political in its intentions; like the title of the show says, it’s nature asking you to wake up. It’s a call to action, a demand to live in the beauty of the moment while it still exists.
Lots of them are gorgeous paintings, but also very aware of their influences. There’s lots of pointillism here, tonnes of symbolism, references to Hurvin Anderson and Dexter Dalwood, the jungle simplicity of Henri Rousseau, the hazy washes of Peter Doig, the spiritual surrealism of Dorothea Tanning. It’s Seurat and Gauguin and Kahlo and Hockney, impressionism and modernism – it’s all these elements dragged into the jungle, and revived.
The works feel like Guzmán looking at her world and thinking oh my god, this is amazing, this is so beautiful, just look at it. And it’s totally infectious. It is amazing, and it is beautiful – nature is stunning. These dizzying paintings are Guzmán asking you to be present in your own nature too. Even if it’s a rainy morning in Margate.
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Hulda Guzmán: Please Awake – Asked Nature Kindly is at Turner Contemporary, Margate, 23 May to 13 September
