Meet The Artist – David Guez

Meet The Artist – David Guez

Across the spectrum of art history, from the earliest known cave painters to the present,artists have sought to convey thoughts, ideas and emotions that would transcend time and place.

David Guez’s work accomplishes this.

 

Referencing ancient cave painting and cutting-edge mark making of contemporary masters, his work is both personal and universal – abstract but suggests narrative. He’s been able to create his own vernacular, a deliberate, disciplined and highly personal code of expression. Born in Tunis, immigrating to Paris as a child, Guez moved to Los Angeles after completing his education. Today he lives in Jerusalem with his wife, Evelyne, who is also an artist, and their children.

Having resided in four countries, conversing in multiple languages, it’s not surprising that his work is a synthesis of who he is, where he has been and, most significantly, that his art communicates in a universal language.

With his domestic-scale, gestural paintings, built up through pronounced marks in oil on canvas, there is both timelessness and immediacy.

Each abstract mark is an expression,an expulsion of spiritual and physical energy. A statement. Guez creates a visual language through mark making, conveying his own personality, spirituality, psychologicalstate and commentary on the world we live in.

The evolution of David Guez’s work begins with a predominant sun burning throughthick clouds shattering an already fragmented groundscape. The blazing sun then becomes a small red presence in the background, a distant metaphor – a beacon,undiscovered planet or drone signaling a new order.

This lasts just a short time untildisruption enters again with porous boundaries; the red dot is an indefinable mass, a smudge, suggesting disarray and leakage from all corners.

Guez’s story resumes again when he returns with the red protagonist, albeit now magnified. An amorphous speck floats where the piercing sun was in earlier works. Orbitlines appear and define it in space as a tactile relevant force. In more recent years, Guez paints with greater abstraction, heavier background articulation and more precise texture. Guez’s story intensifies again, as he articulates in monochrome palettes – black, gold and white.

Each painting speaking with measured strokes and each meditative stroke steadily applied like a stacked brick. The latest paintings are amongst his most powerful to date and their message – both formal and conceptual – echo the disruption of global rhythms while providing Guez a window for change and evolution underpinning his core spiritual values. In these paintings, Guez’s signature markings are reset in new directions with strong angles, cracking or floating apart from the dominant colour blocks.

These new works tell new stories, stories within the stories Guez has been telling since he first applied paint to canvas.

Leave a comment