Turner Contemporary, Margate
The young Dominican painter’s dizzyingly beautiful jungle scenes will transport you to the tropics – and remind you of the wonders of the natural world
Deep in the Dominican rainforest, high up on a mountain, miles from anywhere, Hulda Guzmán stares at an endless expanse of jungle. From her modernist wooden studio, built by her architect father Eddie, she looks out into the vast greenness of her world, the deep blues of the ocean in the distance, the warm oranges and yellows of the sky, and she feels peace. She feels a sense of oneness with nature.
It’s a kind of spiritual positivity that’s a little hard to empathise with when you’re under the leaden skies of the UK, but if you lose yourself in Guzmán’s psychedelic Caribbean landscape painting you can almost be transported to the tropics. The young Dominican artist’s paintings here in her first institutional show in Europe are ultra-colourful jungle reveries, filled with allusions to art history and mythical beings.
