David Castillo presents Adler Guerrier: Small Oscillations Among Everyday Forms, the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
A weedy bundle of leaves and burrs emerges from the shadows, picked out by sunlight in stark chiaroscuro—the name of Guerrier’s photograph “Untitled (What must be valued–spaces where … thought, sunshine, flowers, intangibles, necessities, time, freedom … are held.) ii”, 2026, reveals the magnitude of the small, the seemingly inconsequential, the objects on the periphery. Guerrier is a flâneur, observing on long walks through Miami the edges of the landscape, particularly domestic spaces: backyards, front yards, wild plants growing atop stucco and spiritual offerings left at the foot of a tree. “At this scale of observation, one can parse the many hierarchies from the flow of social life, that may allow reflection and evaluation of these abstractions that form and shape the possibility of living meaningfully,” Guerrier writes, the abstractions being the stuff of life, which demand we make meaning of them: the structures imposed upon us, the languages we speak, the spaces we construct and then lovingly tend to.
For Small Oscillations Among Everyday Forms, photographs of flora (including the aforementioned “Untitled”), both made in Miami backyards, are transformed into paper collages dotted with rectangular swatches in grey, white, black, and an earthy olive. Guerrier’s collages are often like palimpsests or diagrams, containing a photograph flanked by spheres and patches of color drawn from the original image. Here, the wildflowers are also transferred onto paper, rendered in graphite, acrylic, and gouache, sunset-pink and green, their colors renewed. Flowers made into photos, made into paintings, repeated, repeated again: these are the small oscillations of the exhibition’s title. Guerrier turns the world’s edges into its center, refocusing the eye toward the periphery; the significance of the everyday is newly profound. A small flower tells the story of the home it grows alongside, its neighborhood, the community’s demographics, the soil that holds its root. It reveals the people who’ve stepped on it, noticed it, loved it.
Adler Guerrier is a Haitian-born artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores place, identity, urban space, politics, and the poetics of everyday geography. Working across photography, drawing, collage, printmaking, sculpture, and installation, Guerrier examines the social and psychological dimensions of landscape through assemblage, walking, recurring forms, and the recomposition of text and image. His work often engages diaspora, migration, architecture, and the built environment, using photographs, prints, sculptural interventions, and collaged works on paper to consider how race, class, and culture are embedded in cities and in the ways people move through them. Miami is a central site in his practice, functioning both as a lived geography and as a broader framework for thinking about belonging, urban change, and memory. His work has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the California African American Museum; the Whitney Biennial, and David Castillo, among other venues. His work is held in collections including Pérez Art Museum Miami, ICA Miami, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Walker Art Center
“It suggests that the only kind of world in which real love is possible is a world in which people are liberated by their own fragility, where they can approach the condition of trees, flowers, stars, and sounds and abandon the lamentable fantasy of leaving their mark on the world or each other.”
