Landslide - Original Painting

Original Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 72 x 1.75 inches, 2022 · Saturation Point collection

A composition caught mid-collapse. Stained fields of charcoal, ochre, and chartreuse soak into the canvas, bleeding and pooling along the weave, while broad white strokes tear diagonally across the surface — layered, dragged, and flecked with spatter where the brush let go. Everything moves outward from the center, as though something has just given way. Rust and gold surface at the left edge, a wedge of deep slate anchors the upper right, and the whole piece holds that tension between what settled into the canvas and what was pushed across it. Dramatic at six feet wide and rewarding from any distance. Wired and ready to hang.

Saturation Point is a body of work in which paint is allowed to sink into the canvas rather than sit on top of it. Thinned acrylic is flooded onto the surface and left to spread, pool, and bleed along the weave, soaking in until the color becomes part of the cloth itself. Over those stained fields Guererra works with large brushes and palette knives, sweeping opaque passages of white and light across the saturated ground. The two states hold each other in tension: one absorbed and uncontrollable, the other deliberate and physical. The results are atmospheric and weather-driven — currents, squalls, light breaking across open water — paintings that feel less built than arrived at, caught at the moment the surface could hold no more.

"These paintings are about letting go. I flood the canvas with thinned paint and let it find its own way — it bleeds, pools, and travels wherever the weave takes it, and there's only so much I can do to steer it. Then I come back in with big brushes and palette knives and move across what's already there, adding the marks I do control. I'm always chasing that point where the canvas is completely saturated and something has to give. The work lives right at that edge — between what I decided and what the paint decided." — Teodora Guererra