David Guez
David Guez
David Guez (born 1954, Tunisia) is a self-taught painter based in Jerusalem with an outstanding trajectory in contemporary painting. After living in Paris and Los Angeles, Guez decided to express himself by elaborating an artistic language that is universal to the eye, which he articulates in coherent abstract aesthetics.
Guez’s painting practice, centers on gestural compositions which he creates using oil on canvas. His primarily large-scale compositions establish a conceptual link to the medium of sculpture, whose monumentality and materiality are sources of inspiration and the driving force of Guez’s artistic universe. In our increasingly digital world, Guez’s art touches on timelessness and immediacy. Each of his abstract marks is a statement of his effervescent and almost sculptural language. Like the Morse Code, his mixture of spontaneous and rhythmic brushing creates purely subjective and playful commentaries on the times we live in.
David Guez's work has gained international acclaim, his painting practice has been compared with Art Autre, an American school of ‘art of another kind' also referred to as informal art. Art Autre was a dominant trend of abstract art in the 1940s and 1950s, and it was characterized by an improvisatory approach and highly gestural technique. As Italian critic Paolo Levi states, "Guez has this whole American tradition of informal art behind him. Seventy years later, he still manages to make the poetic unease of abstract imagery float, intriguing us and proving that it is still possible to create a narrative through red, green, white, and blue, as if the pictorial writing could perhaps be infinite." Guez is a master of vision, Levi says. His ‘Reason and passion feed the map of an unknown terrain that opens to the eyes of consciousness and perception." Within this aesthetic framework, David Guez’s fresh approach to abstract art merges tradition with a vigorous energy that renders passion into creative spontaneity on (often monumental) canvas.
Guez’s artwork has been presented in solo exhibitions in venues such as D&, M Gallery and Rothschild 49 in Tel Aviv, Fairmont Hotel in Monte Carlo, Monaco and in significant group exhibitions such as “PERSONAL STRUCTURES. Reflections” an official Collateral Event of the Venice Biennale, organized by the European Cultural Centre, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, 2022.
