If mimicry is flattery, then the late Jandyra Waters’ 1980s abstractions found in Theodore Ereira-Guyer a dedicated admirer. The works share their size and palette; the painters shared a language. The two have not met, yet this four-hander tricks the viewer that Waters’ oils – in their serial form reminiscent, perhaps, of Etel Adnan – and Ereira-Guyer’s plaster and coloured glass etchings – downstream in design from Anselm Kiefer, say – were made by the same artist.
Some of Ereira-Guyer’s pigment and cement assemblies pay homage to Waters’ canvases explicitly: one glossy mess of corrosion hangs under a patchy oil pill, for example, as though in continuation of the same thought. Other pairings diverge from this pattern, only forcing the eye to draw inferences where there may be none.
Continuing consistently across the show, this game of mix-and-match throws any one-to-one mapping into doubt, only to reaffirm it. Ereira-Guyer’s tribute is, therefore, a kind of unconscious ‘abstract plagiarism’ endemic to all painting. The human mind is mimetic – all art is representation.