Cherry, cherry brings together paintings Charlotte Winifred Guérard made between the Royal Academy Schools studios (summer 2025) and the Hampshire countryside (Xenia residency, spring 2026). Each work is an abstraction that responds to Guérard's inner worlds - shades of thoughts, distant memories, and more tangible experiences of life meet on the canvas.
The title, Cherry, cherry, captures the feeling of jumping from spring to summer, when persistent, piercing light enhances the colours around us - a temporal shift echoed by the lazy, heat-imbued mood of JJ Cale's "Cherry”, which influenced Guérard at the time. The show stages a dialogue between materiality and external observation. Works such as Esquise (2025) and La Valse (2025) condense layers and bold marks that hint at representation but remain largely abstract; while the hanging works reveal the underlayers of a painting and staining that takes place on the surfaces.
The motifs draw on imaginary worlds, with nods to the circus, dance, and play, rendered in vivid reds, blacks, and purples. Set against these, direct references to the botanical scenes of Hampshire move the work toward a palette of earthy ochres, deep forest blues, and sun-bleached pinks.
The installation considers the multiplicity of these layers. It invites the audience to move with the work, around it, behind it - to discover the foundations and traces of the process of painting. The exhibition continues Guérard's reflection on painting in space, apprehending the medium outside its borders and pushing the scale to attempt a physical response to the work.
A private view will take place at the gallery on Thursday 2nd July, 6-8pm.
