Léonie Guyer: three and three and one

Léonie Guyer has spent a handful of decades scouring roads of refuse and reams of centuries-old paper in search of something to mark. She shares a formative story about attending an Art History course at the San Francisco Art Institute, where the margins of her notes begin to populate with the earliest iterations of her enigmatic forms. This quasi-scholarly communion with centuries of aesthetic history has yet to cease. As one sits with the work, allusions to Cycladic marbles, Goryeo Dynasty celadon vessels, or posture from Mannerist painting begin to bubble in one's mind. When asked where her forms originate, the artist plainly states, “I don’t know. They are arrived at.”.

For Guyer, the substrates transmitting her forms are an integral component to entering them. The marble is reclaimed from offcuts unworthy of luxury kitchen and bathroom remodels in San Francisco. Their prefabricated nature often presents a serendipitous tension between precise cuts and rough, seemingly archaeological corners. Once a form is determined, Guyer incises its boundaries into the marble then carefully builds layers of pigment to develop its permeating aura. One can most presently detect a ghostly pentimento in, Untitled, no. 116, where the remnants of a previous form can be seen caressing its fully developed inhabitant.

This recessed quality of the erased form is echoed throughout the works on paper. The agate-burnished double weight Indian jute paper is made by Mohammed Hussein Khagzi using traditional Indian paper making techniques. Production of this paper has recently ceased, blank pages destined to go extinct. Guyer’s interventions are sensitive, their fluidity complements the unusual soft sheen and organic composition of the rectilinear plane. These forms seem to hover between legibility and illegibility on the page in contrast to the decided behavior of the forms on marble.

The three marble works and three works on paper are orchestrated across the primary walls of the gallery. The one referenced in the exhibition’s title introduces a new site-based painting nestled in between the gallery’s folding security gate and exterior window. Informed by the architecture, history, and social structures of the space, the site-based painting will ideally accompany that wall until its opportunity to confound archaeologists excavating the remains of San Francisco.

Three and three and one incorporates key throughlines of Guyer’s approach to form and material; their alchemy presents a negation to be fully deciphered. Joining a tradition of objects born from civilization lost, rendering their full comprehension impossible. Instead of a didactic method of knowing one must relinquish their desire to over analyze and engage with unknowing.

Evan Moore