Be Kind to Your Demons (The Nightmare)

2018 - Painting (Painting)

68 x 68 cm

Hulda Guzmán

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Be Kind to Your Demons is a series of paintings by Hulda Guzmán that presents a variety of scenes in which female characters carry out ubiquitous activities in the company of secondary characters (mostly men) and devil-like creatures. Like much of her work, Be Kind to Your Demons is an invitation to embrace the devil in each of us, to surrender to bodily and external pleasures, and to engage in a conscious dialogue with our own existence. Guzmán’s paintings are a reminder of the brevity, potential intensity, and frailty of human existence. In particular, The Nightmare features a demonic creature licking the feet of a sleeping couple. The characters are in a spacious room, decorated with mid-century modern furniture and abundant foliage. The architecture of the space towers over the couple, while a moody seascape looms in the distance. Guzmán allows the grain of the wood to come through the painting, heightening its textural, sensorial tone. Drawing from surrealism, Mexican muralism, and Caribbean folk traditions, Guzmán’s painting is an eloquent representation of her rich inner world; one in which moral schemes and rigid notions of good and evil collapse in on one another.

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Hulda Guzmán’s paintings blend magical realism, the supernatural, extra-sensorial, and the pleasures of earthly existence set in the context of tropical landscapes or modernist architecture. Her delicate use of gouache and ink on wood and sophisticated compositions portray scenes that speak both of a Dominican and Caribbean identity, and of her personal view of the world. Often self-referential, Guzmán’s works are colorful, mystical, and ecstatic. They depict intimate or public, celebratory and sensual (if not directly sexual) scenes, encounters, or gatherings which feed from her upbringing in a liberal context. Her seductive scenes often include herself, her partners and friends, and members of the Dominican artist community. The artist reaffirms and questions tropes associated with the Caribbean such as hot weather, an inclination to festivity, and an amalgamation of religious traditions. Like many Dominicana artists, her work is determined by the insularity of the country, by its crafts traditions, and by the sea.

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Colors:

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• surrealism.n.01
• supernatural.n.01
• sex.n.04
• architecture.n.02
• narrative.n.01