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Diana Guerrero-Maciá
Diana Guerrero-Maciá

Life exists not just in pulsing creatures and plants, but also in fabrics and patterns. I know this from The Devil’s Daughter Is Getting Married, a folklorically titled solo show by Diana Guerrero-Maciá, mounted but basically unviewable this past spring at Carrie Secrist Gallery in Chicago. To make her unpainted paintings, Guerrero-Maciá stitches together scraps of wool and linen, strips of deconstructed old clothing, even sometimes pieces of vintage wooden toys, aligning them all in geometric configurations on large canvases. In some other artist’s hands, the end result could easily be an eclectic mess or a rigorous ordering of things; under the care of Guerrero-Maciá, sentience appears. Sometimes this is obvious: the pink and black eyes staring out the center of “Born in the Sixties,” the white-on-white breasts and bellybutton near the bottom of “The Let Down.” Other times it is more of a feeling: the stone left atop the frame of “A Perfect Day,” the fizzy orange aperitif bubbles in “Italian Summer.” Look closely, and know that something is looking right back at you.

—Lori Waxman 2020-10-28 5:32 PM