My paintings begin with images found in the world. Fragments of atmosphere, surfaces, and fleeting perceptual moments that are initially chosen for their formal qualities: line, color, value, and shape. These images serve less as subjects than as points of entry into a process of reduction and reorganization. Through painting, they are gradually stripped of descriptive function and rebuilt as structures of color and spatial tension.

Within the painting, forms assert themselves through contrast, compression, and balance. Color carries weight; edges hold or release space. The image stabilizes as relationships between these elements lock into place, producing a composition that feels both immediate and highly constructed. Forms extend from edge to edge, emphasizing continuity and density across the surface. Gestures remain in the act of joining color, pattern, and texture together, producing fields where broad passages evoke watery plains or fragrant hillsides while striated marks suggest protective surfaces, layers of rind, skin, or membrane. Veils of white and stippled points introduce resistance within these proliferating areas, slowing the eye and interrupting any reading of the work as pure expressionism. 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, Mexixo 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 in locations such as White Columns in New York and in participation with 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.