Jennifer Guidi’s Waterfall at Gagosian Paris draws on Pointillism and nature

The first thing that stands out about Jennifer Guidi’s paintings is their luminosity—natural landscapes are rendered in saturated pinks, purples, blues and warm yellows. Waterfalls gleam against multicoloured rock, and the suns, central to many of her paintings, seem to shimmer with heat and warmth. Up close, the landscape reveals itself as painstakingly rendered with thousands of small dots of colour, drawing on Pointillism to create movement and energy in her work. At the Gagosian in Paris, new works by Guidi, including paintings in oil, gouache and watercolour, come together in Waterfall. Guidi explained her process to STIR, saying, “My process is very physical and intuitive. I love oil paint, the colour, the texture, the way it moves, and I’m interested in building a painting slowly through repeated marks and gestures. Pointillism has been important to me because a single mark can be very simple, but through repetition and accumulation those marks begin to create an image, a surface, a sense of light and even a kind of vibration.”

The American artist, who grew up in Palm Desert in California, is inspired by the desert landscape she grew up in. The works radiate and glow with heat and colour, stretching into the distance of Guidi’s imagined world. “Growing up in Palm Desert had a profound effect on me. The desert is an incredibly specific environment: the intensity of the light, the openness of the sky, the mountains, the heat, the colours and the vastness of the landscape. There is also a stillness to it. All of those things became part of my visual memory. Looking back, I can see that growing up in the desert shaped my sensitivity to colour, light, space and landscape. Those experiences continue to find their way into the worlds I make in my paintings.”

Pointillism, an art movement that emerged as a response to the subjectivity of the popular Impressionist movement, began in the late 19th century with Paul Signac and Georges Seurat, who created Un Dimanche Après-Midi À L'île De La Grande Jatte (1884). The painting’s complexity and movement—echoing the shimmer of a hot summer afternoon—were created by juxtaposing coloured dots of paint rather than the passionate brushstrokes of the Impressionists. It was a way to embrace science, precision and optics while creating bold, colourful works that would transform with the position of the viewer. For Guidi, the process is more spiritual, allowing her to engage with time on a deeper level in her works, mirroring the staggering geological timescales contained within the waters, lands and skies she depicts. “One mark follows another, and that repetition creates its own rhythm. In that sense, the process of making the painting can feel connected to rhythms in nature, waves, falling water, changing light, wind, growth, erosion,” said Guidi.

Bringing the natural world into the imagined worlds in her painting is of the utmost importance to Guidi. This, along with her focus on materiality, led to her experiments with incorporating sand into her paintings. It changes how the paint behaves and underscores Guidi’s connection to the earth and the places she is inspired by.

Another point of inspiration for the contemporary artist comes from much closer to home—New Mexico’s Transcendental Painting Group. The collective, which included artists like the modernist painter Agnes Pelton, rejected straightforward realism in landscape painting. They combined abstraction with mysticism, spirituality and symbolism to create works that revealed the cosmic rhythms, colours, light and breath of nature, glowing with life. The movement’s meditative works and undulating landscapes provided reprieve at a time of desperation in 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression and between two world wars.

Similarly, Guidi hopes her work brings audiences the sense of awe, quiet and pause found in pockets of nature. “I came to Agnes Pelton and the Transcendental Painting Group later, and I feel a real connection to the way she found something spiritual and mysterious in the landscape. I’m interested in nature in a similar way, not simply as something to depict, but as a place where you can experience a heightened awareness of being alive,” explained Guidi.

Waterfall is an emotional and loving tribute to nature and the California desert ecosystem that shaped the artist. Guidi blends techniques from disparate movements to create an aesthetic that is unique and moving, capturing the magic of a desert sunrise or a cool spring on a hot day in a way that no photograph can. Speaking about what she hopes audiences take away from Waterfall, she says, “I hope people have an emotional response to the work before they feel they need to understand it. I would love for the paintings to create a moment of pause, a feeling of awe, optimism, calm or simply pleasure in looking. At its heart, Waterfall is about my love for this world and my gratitude to be here in the present moment. It is also about my love of making and my love of painting. If someone leaves the exhibition feeling a little more aware of colour, light, nature or the world around them, that would mean a great deal to me.”

‘Waterfall’ is on view from September 3 – October 10, 2026, at the Gagosian in Paris, France.