Fragments of images are gradually stripped of descriptive function and rebuilt as structures of color and spatial tension.

The image stabilizes as relationships between these elements lock into place, producing a composition that feels both immediate and highly constructed. Gestures remain in the act of joining color, pattern, and texture together, producing fields where broad passages evoke watery plains or fragrant hillsides. Complementary colors press against one another, black against yellow, orange with blue, creating a push and pull in which no single area recedes into background. Every form contorts against its neighbor so that the entire surface participates equally in the saturation of the image. In this way, the paintings operate as condensed fields of attention. Forms hover between recognition and abstraction, holding traces of the images from which they originate while asserting their own formal autonomy. What remains is a composition that feels both inevitable and provisional: an arrangement of color, space, and light that arrives through sustained looking and careful editing. The finished work is less a depiction of a moment than a record of the process by which perception is slowed, distilled, and reorganized into a new visual order.

Heather Guertin (b. 1981, Worcester, Massachusetts) received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include a two-person exhibition at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, and solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles; JDJ, New York; Galería Agustina Ferreyra, Mexico City; Brennan & Griffin, NY; Proyectos Monclova, MX; and Galería Agustina Ferreyra, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Group exhibitions include Grouper, Broadway, NY; How to Call the Spirits, Chapter, NY; East Side to the West Side, Flag Art Foundation, NY; and Addicted to Highs and Lows, Bortolami, NY. She has performed at White Columns in New York and as part of the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2013, Guertin published a novella titled Model Turned Comedian with Social Malpractice and Publication Studio, which was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp. In 2015, a monograph of her works was published by Hassla Books. Guertin lives and works in upstate New York.