Exhibition Statement
Modern society suffers from a temporal crisis, not a shortage of time, but a slip in our hold of its fragrance, texture, and meaning. Today’s accelerated, atomized time, structured by productivity, efficiency, and constant stimulation has deemphasized temporal duration and depth. Yet the essence of the human condition lies in the slowness of the mundane, the everyday, the gradual changes, and in being almost there. Our lives consist of experiencing a series of “on the ways,” and impending anticipated arrivals. Prim and mottled forms arranged to this end, a solo exhibition of new works on paper by Adler Guerrier, contemplates textures, spatial structures, and temporalities within the notion of “pending.” The word derives from the French preposition pendant (“during”), tracing back to the Latin pendere, meaning “to hang” or “to suspend.”
Pending, for Guerrier, is a mode of being with its own interiority, its own spatial and temporal elasticity, articulated as a survival strategy of the not-yet nor fully liberated, deployed for its generative and freeing potentiality. Through drawing, photography, collage, and mixed media, Guerrier explores how this temporality, as it emerged within compositions and arrangements, might offer a kind of spatial strata, one where everyday survival is posited as life long goal and the easy reach for forms of goodness.
Art discourse readily addresses beauty, sublimity, truth, and the uncanny. Goodness, by contrast, has seemed too earnest, too unguarded, too simple to sustain critical attention. In this body of work, Guerrier challenges this, proposing that goodness is the very end for pending, weathering, and moving through the affirming conditions under which survival becomes livable. He distinguishes two registers. The first is expansive: goodness as totality, utopian, or paradise. The second is quotidian: as in the well-wishing of a good morning, or the mood enhancing of a shared joke, the settled calm contentment of simply being. The latter is threaded into the complexities of life, prompting us to wonder how we each inhabit and move through this temporal space.
In Untitled (This here moment propels and guides) and Untitled (California poppies, Los Angeles) i, Guerrier explores the spatial and temporal dimensions of being and pending through the subject of wildflowers. Wildflowers operate in a spatial asideness from structured and urban modernity, following their own botanical life cycles and abundant colorful forms of goodness, thriving amongst piles of trash, exhaust fumes, harsh concrete, and reduced biodiversity. Guerrier’s formal choreography of drawing, collage, and painting, as seen in Untitled (Field Guide–exposure to enchanted forms) xvii and Untitled (A will to adorn; détourné) i, intentionally calls attention to the forms’ substructures, varied mark-making, and materiality. The exposed underlayers of paper, edge lines, and splashes of paint reveal the works’ coming into being, creating and sustaining the conditions for durational observation. This emphasis on materiality underscores the works’ medium-ness. In doing so, it counters the contemporary prioritization of immediacy (without anything in between), and ultimately reasserts art’s place and power as both medium and mediation.
Prim and mottled forms arranged to this end endeavors to restore the scent and depth of time. The exhibition reminds us that human beings are often shaped less by the act of arriving than by the particular way they inhabit the interval before arrival, forged in how they travel between the ground that holds and the horizon that keeps, always, its patient distance.
re.riddle
