In Charlotte Winifred Guérard’s recent paintings, intimations of landscapes and bodies jostle
alongside areas of pure abstraction. Her colours, like the flash of vivid wings against a vast
grey sky, are a study in contrast; the texture of her paint is earthy and unvarnished. She works
swiftly, trusting in her intuition, and is restless with the expectation that paintings should
hang politely on white walls, preferring instead to test the physical limitations of the medium,
experimenting with different methods of production and installation. Over the past year, she’s
felt a strong desire to place her work back into the environment that inspired it. Like the British
surrealist, Ithell Colquhoun – an artist whose work, along with many others, has exerted a great influence on Guérard – she believes in energy: in the vitality of the land and the sky, in rocks and bones, in bodies and minds, all of which enter her images via circuitous routes.
Over the past year, Guérard has set herself the task of going more deeply into her craft. She
coated two-hundred small boards with gesso and, in order to teach herself how to handle oil
paint, gave herself permission to paint whatever sprang to mind. This resulted in a body of work that has expanded what the artist describes as her ‘vocabulary in the dictionary of ideas and images’.
When I visited her studio at the Royal Academy, she laid a selection of the small paintings on the floor for me to see. They’re swift, vivid, playful; an exercise in both freedom of expression and association. Suggestions of towers, staircases and curtains mingle with references to bodies; at times, it’s as if something or someone is dissolving into the ether. The sea and the sky is ever present, in swathes of blue and in translucent washes of watery colour. In each image, Guérard plays with mark making, from a trembling, lonely line to the rough texture of a tree trunk and areas that simply exult in colour. What vibrations, she seems to be asking, might be sparked if she placed, say, a pink expanse against a moss green undergrowth?
Guérard is interested in the process of layering: be it layers of paint, or the overlapping of
images, or the layers of memory that stack up to form a record of human experience. For
example, she created her two-metre tall painting Facing Away (2023) by copying and
enlarging, one by one, fifteen of her studies: she would let a layer dry and then paint the next
one on top of it. The result is a ghostly sense of presence and absence. Guérard is, by her own
admission, ‘deeply nostalgic’, constantly mining her memories of what she saw and felt as a
child. She grew up in the countryside in Normandy in an old house surrounded by a forest. She
explains: ‘I started drawing links with how I experience the world today, always a foot in the
past, deeply engorged within my mind and body whilst sensitive to the outside and nature.’
During this time of experimentation, Guérard became interested in what she calls ‘interactive
painting’ and ‘painting beyond the frame’. She drew up a list of over twenty themes that
preoccupied her, which included narrative, self-portrait, multiplicity, accumulation, dancing,
painting, display and so on. She created a series of mobile room dividers, Desire Paths (2023), by painting details from her small studies – areas of translucent blue; dreamy, creamy oyster-shell shapes floating in a lime green expanse; what might be the corner of a field – onto
both sides of a canvas stretched on steel panels and supported by wheels. She writes: ‘The
idea was to produce a circle space where you can stand within the painting and see it as it
rotates. The concept of motion for this work shifted after production as it revealed different
opportunities for display. Each panel is detachable from each other, therefore creating a
variety of dispositions on display.’
Earlier this year, Guérard undertook a residency at Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall.
Colquhoun, of course, is intricately associated with the county, where she moved in 1946 and
lived until her death in 1981. Traumatised by her experiences in London during the war, nature,
for Colquhoun – as it is for Guérard – was deeply restorative: every stone, stream, bird and
tree contained a unique energy and mystic significance. Colquhoun believed that modern
life, so mired in materialism, had lost touch with the primal energies of the natural world, the
mysteries of the unconscious and the solace of spiritualism. Colquhoun also explored sexuality
and gender in the human, natural and celestial realms in a series of paintings, drawings and
poems titled ‘Diagrams of Love’. While she believed in the ‘divine feminine’, she felt that at
some distant time masculine and feminine energies had been united.
Guérard felt increasingly drawn to the late artist’s myriad explorations of the land and the
body and spent hours drawing amid the neolithic stone circles of Lamorna and the Merry
Maidens, feeling Colquhoun’s spirit to be very close. She writes:
I found myself absorbed by Ithell’s exploration of female genitalia and sexuality at a time
where I was also discovering my sexuality and wanting to feel empowered by the powers
and wonders of the female body such as the period cycle. I also feel drawn to her
perceptions on the natural environment, intertwined with an attentiveness to the human
mind and body.
During a visit to Tate Britain in London, Duncan Grant’s Abstract Kinetic Collage Painting with
Sound (1914) mesmerised Guérard: a four-and-a-half metre long gouache and watercolour on paper on canvas. Grant intended the painting to be viewed in a continuous slow movement across an aperture, moving from left to right. Movement was to come about through the mechanical operation of twin spools, one on each side of the aperture, hidden from the spectator’s view, which would house the canvas. The artist intended that, as the painting passed across the aperture, the spectator should hear slow music by J. S. Bach.
Although Grant’s ambition wasn’t realised until Tate Gallery built his machine in 1974,
the possibility of a moving image struck Guérard as exciting: a way of animating her interest
in the intersections of painting, dance, film, installation and stage design. She learnt to weld
in the studios of the Royal Academy Schools and designed and built a freestanding two-
and-a-half metre long work titled Manual Scroll (2024), made from wood and steel, which
accommodates a roll of paper or canvas that is activated by a handle that winds the artwork
through the machine. She painted a ten-metre-long work – a lyrical, airy, semi-abstracted
study of dreamlike bodies and fragments of landscape – which she displayed in the Manual
Scroll (2024) around St Ives: on the deck of a fisherman’s trawler (her friend Matthew’s boat),
on the shore beneath Colquhoun’s home in Lamorna and in a field. The film she made of herself doing this is yet another component of the work.
In many ways, Guérard’s studio is a laboratory; a place where the artist examines and builds on her ever-expanding repertoire of images and ideas, testing the boundaries of what is possible. It’s an art of process and accumulation, a way, she explains, of thinking about the agency of painting – not only ‘how it’s behaving’ but ‘how I’m behaving’. As much as she’s immersed in the art of the past, Guérard’s gaze is fixed firmly on the future. As she explains, she’s ‘taking a very traditional medium and thinking about how it can be looked at now’.
