Magalie Guérin’s paintings often begin with what remains: she carries forward yesterday’s pigment, a trace of past works and decisions, as a provocation to begin a new composition. From this material residue she builds paintings that are both generative and iterative—they are works that remember and reference themselves even as they continually evolve, build, and refuse to settle. 

Guérin’s works explore how colour and shape behave as subjects in their own right; they enter the pictorial space like characters with distinct temperaments, personalities, and roles: a vibrant chartreuse pierces its crooked hook near centre; a golden yellow hums at the sharp edge of an undulating beige plane; a mottled brown or pool of dark teal brace at the edges of the canvas; an intense orange announces itself like a flare.  

In concert with these colours, textures rise into low relief, sweeping in from edges, dappling and complicating the surface while contours and geometric intervals anchor or disrupt composition. Shapes overlay, press, or emerge, and through the vibrating congregation of all these elements, figure and ground negotiate with one another.  

Although often grouped under abstraction, Guérin resists the term. Her concern is not to deny the world, but to construct compositions that feel undeniably of it. The way colour enters the work is directly linked to Guérin’s relationship to place, objects, and time—perhaps through the surprisingly lush pallet of the desert around Marfa, Texas, or a pair of favourite shoes, and, of course, through the previous day’s painting. In this way, elements from the world are present—yet elusive. 

She says of the spatial relationships within her paintings: “I think of them as constructions of shapes that exist in the world, even though you can’t recognize them. You don’t know what they are, but you sense that they ARE.”1. In these paintings, resolution is not a matter of clarity but of presence: when an image is resolved, it coheres with its own frequency, its own internal reasoning. In this space of constructive uncertainty, Guérin offers a way of seeing that is both playful and rigorous: a field where shapes relate to each other, where logic develops from intuition, and where the world emerges with a mysterious but grounded insistence. 

1. Sangram Majumdar, “Interview: Magalie Guérin’s Multiple Endings,” Two Coats of Paint, March 3, 2021, https://twocoatsofpaint.com/2019/03/interview-magalie-guerins-multiple-endings.html.