Abel Guzmán

Abel Guzmán is a first-generation Mexican American artist living and working in Los Angeles.
Born in 1988 in Crystal Lake, Illinois, Guzman completed his BFA at Northern Illinois University
and his MFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. His works have been exhibited at
0.0 Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Inferno (New York, NY), Siblings (Chicago, IL), and elsewhere.
Guzman easily shifts between abstract and referential imagery, his ritualistic, bold strokes act as
the unifying element throughout his multimedia drawing practice. Deeply concerned with
harnessing and relinquishing the energies of the universe, his practice centers the queer brown
body as a vessel of the unknown.
Equal parts ancestral folklore, queer autobiography, and mystical intuition, Abel Guzman’s latest
body of work irrevocably binds the sacred and obscene. The artist comfortably oscillates
between figurative and abstract images while brandishing a range of drawing media, tenderly
building up material through ritualistic application. In contrast to traditional white backgrounds,
Guzman works across large swaths of brown paper and amatè, the fig bark paper of the
pre-colonized Aztec. Centering the brown queer body, concentric lines reverberate throughout
each work, often overlapping to form psychic-sexual portals that further entangle the corporeal
with the ethereal. Guided by the magic rituals of the unknown, in kinship with the brujeria of his
great-grandmother, Guzman’s practice is, at its core, a meditation on transcendence. This is
most obvious in his abstract works, which originate as restless compulsions and culminate as
vigorously layered gateways into the void. Guzman finishes these abstract ballads in a single,
trancelike sitting, while his narrative drawings are completed over the course of several
sessions. Seeking to reclaim icons of Mexican machismo and religious symbols adopted by
popular culture, Guzman’s large-scale figurative works are richly layered with reference and
mystery. Existing somewhere at the intersection of debauchery and the divine, these illustrated
epics venerate timeless acts of carnal pleasure, tethered to the immediate moment through the
raw intensity of Guzman’s fearless mark-making. Juxtaposing intimacy and anonymity, healing
and trauma, past and present, and most importantly chaos and order, Guzman gently
manipulates the extreme forces of paradox to manifest the primal energies of the universe.