Spiritual Landscapes — this is the title of artist David Guez´s most recent solo exhibition, which opened at Fairmont Hotel Monte Carlo in Monaco, on December 18–19, 2023.

David Guez´s abstract painting has been drawing professional interest with his stunning aesthetics but also his sculptural approach to the canvas. Guez´s Spiritual Landscapes are painted using a knife instead of a brush. This approach to materiality freezes time into stances of sculptural reflections of the artist’s rich and complex inner world. Guez is `carving´ on the canvas surface the immaterial landscapes he’s been fascinated by with a mystical attraction.

The Spiritual Landscapes consists of seventy-one large-scale canvases of oil paintings, most of which seem almost monochromatic. Guez´s use of a single background color is neither accidental nor boring, as he “interrupts the dominant color with other micro-informal bodies in an unsettling way, almost warning us that his monochromatic territory can expand infinitely but can be interrupted with these golden, yellow, and red painterly signs.” The micro-informal bodies, as curator Paolo Levi describes them, are thus `painterly signs´ that allow us to decode Guez´s painting practice by looking at art history, process, and the human desire to create, which give the artist stubborn coherence and inspiring force in the oversaturated field of abstract art.