Rust-coloured abstract textured artwork with intricate patterns, resembling natural or organic forms, featured on Pierre d'Alancaisez's art critique website.

Theodore Ereira-Guyer, Jandyra Waters

We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things

★★★★☆

Curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes
On until 25 November 2025

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.


notes and notices are short and curt exhibition reviews. Read more:

Oh, the Storm at Rodeo ★☆☆☆☆

Oh, the Storm

★☆☆☆☆

This exhibitions is trying to explain the concept of ‘crazy paving’ to a blind man. It’s impossible to tell where a work ends and the wall begins.

A Comparative Dialogue Act, Luxemburg pavilion in Venice ★★☆☆☆

Andrea Mancini, Every Island

A Comparative Dialogue Act

★★☆☆☆

Stage fright is real. Cowardice is another thing altogether.

Some May Work as Symbols at Raven Row ★★★★☆

Some May Work as Symbols: Art Made in Brazil, 1950s–70s

★★★★☆

Art history can catch modernity in splitting from the past and thus from itself.

Dryland, the Greek pavilion in Venice ★★★★☆

Thanasis Deligiannis, Yannis Michalopoulos

Xirómero/Dryland

★★★★☆

It’s Sunday in the village. And the main square is deserted.

Mohammad Ghazali, Trilogy: Then… at Ab-Anbar ★★★★☆

Mohammad Ghazali

Trilogy: Then…

★★★★☆

Repetition and framing are photography’s greatest tricks.

Amanda Wall, Femcel at Almine Rech ★★★☆☆

Amanda Wall

Femcel

★★★☆☆

There’s no dignity in paint when the arc of art history tends to “show hole”.

×