Event
Past Curfew
John Guzman
Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by John Guzman.
John Guzman’s drawings and paintings are a byproduct of experiences and reflections of the artist’s environment, growing up in San Antonio’s Southside. While growing up, John witnessed the psychological and physical deterioration of his peers suffering from various forms of self destructive behaviors. In those early works, Guzman abstracted the human form in a way that reflected the mental and bodily harm endured by those close to him, in turn, portraying the unrecognizable transformations caused by years of punishment, relapse, and self-destruction.
After moving to Connecticut in 2021, these fragmented human forms remained a central theme in his work. However, Guzman’s focus shifts inwardly, reconfiguring anatomies as a tool for obsessive investigations of his own art practice. By cutting, gouging, and carving into heavy bodied paint with charcoal, pastel, and graphite, Guzman excavates new narratives from previous marks and aesthetic choices. Throughout his process, Guzman creates a past to uncover, and a future to, in turn, reinterpret and ultimately cover again.
In the end, a cacophony of disfigured hands, feet, knees and teeth are mangled into beings that churn in limbotic peril; a representation of the artist’s journey through his own physical and mental states of artmaking.
Past Curfew embraces the leap that’s taken from safety to uncertainty. Reflecting on his move from home and initial source of inspiration, John Guzman draws parallels to his artistic process; a system that constantly reevaluates what has happened, what can happen, and what will happen.
Guzman continues to explore biomorphic forms that address the fragility and interiority of the psyche and altered landscapes. He uses his canvases as a constant reinterpretation of one’s individual psychology, further exploring unfamiliar possibilities of the human form in order to better interpret his own means of creation.
About the Artist
John Guzman is a painter born and raised on the South Side of San Antonio, Texas. A self-taught painter, Guzman previously pursued printmaking while studying at the Southwest School of Art. In 2021, the artist presented the solo exhibition I Would Have Killed To See It at Presa House Gallery, curated by Rigoberto Luna, shortly after Guzman was selected as a Studio Fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut. His work has since been featured in distinguished art fairs, including The Armory Show, NYC, and ZONA MACO, CDMX, with New York and Los Angeles-based Sean Kelly Gallery.
Images:
(top)
Spilt Milk, 2022
Charcoal on paper
32” x 40”
(bottom)
Just Friends, 2022
Charcoal on paper
32” x 40”
