Review by Hulda Guzmán – lizards and ghosts gather to make art in the forest | Art

Din the Dominican jungle, on top of a mountain, miles from anywhere, Hulda Guzmán is looking at the endless forest. From his modern wooden studio, built by his architect father Eddie, he looks out at the vast green of his country, the deep ocean in the distance, the warm oranges and yellows of the sky, and he feels peace. They feel one with nature.

It’s the kind of spiritual goodness that’s hard to grasp when you’re living under the UK’s sophisticated skies, but if you lose yourself in Guzmán’s psychedelic Caribbean landscape you’ll be transported to the tropics. The paintings of the young Dominican artist here at his first exhibition in Europe are colorful delights, filled with historical and fictional references.

The first room places you inside his studio, giving you windows into the forest from his private world. Demons from Japanese ukiyo-e art torturing Guzman lying in bed, two lizards facing each other through the window, spirits seem to be jumping out of cups, ghosts are seen as floating orbs, angels visit a bathing mermaid, and wherever you look at the forest entering the world – it goes through the windows, breaks the roof. It’s all mythic and magical, allegorically exotic in the rainforest, with a nod to Jungian psychoanalysis woven into it.

It’s a beautiful painting, but a little heavy and interesting. Guzmán is better in nature, where the landscape becomes the main character, where the forest explodes into life. Giant trees reach for the sky, leaves and foliage wrap themselves in the paintings, fireflies dance in the night. Sometimes the forest is so rich and dense that it is almost impossible to identify. One work is a mist of blues and leaves, a misma of the forest. There are numbers here but they are small, they are living in places, not controlling them. He swims in the sea, walks in the garden, sleeps naked.

They are mainly Guzmán, living his life in this beautiful place. In another photo, he is riding a motorcycle, carrying a palm tree to plant. In other places he waters the plants surrounded by his family and the demons again, but this time they are accepted, they are part of this creation, not the evil forces that are trying to destroy it.

The idea that you get in all these articles is completely abandoned at this point, Guzmán has lost himself in his environment. In the face of environmental degradation, sea level rise and deforestation, these paintings are celebrations of nature and its natural, tangible beauty. His art is almost political in its aims; as the title of the show says, it’s nature asking you to wake up. It is a call to action, a desire to live in the beauty of the present moment.

Most of them are beautiful artists, and they know what they are doing. There’s a lot of pointillism here, tons of symbolism, references to Hurvin Anderson and Dexter Dalwoodforest simplicity of Henri Rousseausmoke washing Peter Doigspiritual surrealism of Dorothea Tanning. With Seurat and Gauguin and Kahlo and Hockney, impressionism and modernism – with all these things dragged into the forest, and revived.

The works sound like Guzmán looking at his world and thinking oh my god, this is amazing, this is so beautiful, just look at it. And it’s completely sick. They and amazing, and and beautiful – nature is amazing. These disturbing images by Guzmán invite you to be with them in your nature. Even if it’s a rainy morning in Margate.