To Sink, Revisited

Blanca Guerrero paints as though she is carefully toeing a line between the surface of her
canvas and what might exist immediately below. Repeatedly through this new body of work
she asks the viewer to change their perspective, proposing that they navigate their way into
impossible settings: between the fibers of single-ply paper, or nestled into pockmarks left after
several glazes have been sanded away. And then, once there, she insists that you stay.

This second solo exhibition began as a reaction to I Sink into the Blue, her first solo show
following a two-month studio residency in the small city of Kōfu, Yamanashi, Japan. Those
paintings evoked the deep blue of the landscape, formed into rigid shapes of cisterns, baths,
and reflecting pools.

To Sink, Revisited, departs from there. It is instructive to regard what Guerrero has carried
over from her previous works—washi-paper collages, light-colored backgrounds,
multi-layered washes of pigment—as well as what she has discarded. The new paintings
are reflective of different environments: physically surrounded in the industrial landscape of
the Gowanus canal, which her studio overlooks; psychically embedded in a social-political moment
where past ease and comfort have been shaken, where gray-areas dominate what were previously
sharply demarcated boundaries; and all reached in a moment of personal rediscovery.