The paintings in California Dreaming find Guidi foregrounding images and ideas of landscape in newly expansive ways. Filled with immersive layers of detail, and keyed to emotional as well as visual categories of experience, they are defined by the palpable material presence that has defined the artist’s project over the last fifteen years, as well as a searching, dreamlike quality that constitutes a powerful new addition to her vocabulary. Underscoring this development, all works on view are horizontal in format. Their sizes vary and include large-scale canvases, medium-format pictures, and a single, highly condensed small-scale work.

California Dreaming represents a full-circle journey for Guidi, who began as a figurative painter before gradually removing references to the observed world in favor of increasingly non-objective, abstract imagery. The exhibition suggests that these seemingly divergent tendencies were never fully separate. Following inspirations as diverse as the color theories and scientific humanism of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the worldly transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the artist has created pictures of what can be seen as well as what it feels like to see.

Though the paintings cannot be linked to specific places, they function as a series of kaleidoscopic essays on what it might mean to see in a Californian way. Guidi turns her meditative and process-oriented attention to luminous images of mountains, sky, and sea. Guidi’s depictions of these landscapes are characterized by their grandeur, beauty, and all-over treatment of their surfaces. She assembles interlocking planes that can be read both in terms of their depth and their flatness. Within these planes, several mark-making techniques are employed to establish dimensionality.

Hills and mountains, for instance, are adorned with countless dots of paint that recall the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experiments of the Impressionists and Pointillists. Beyond the optical effects these marks conjure, they offer formal and content-based analogues to the sand that Guidi mixes into the grounds with which she begins each picture. In both cases, the accumulation of many small, discrete things becomes an overarching vision. Perception of such extremes evokes the feeling of looking at landscapes, which alternately engulf, entice, overwhelm, enchant, and subsume their viewers. Mandalas continue to play important roles in the compositions, standing in for sun and moon, and providing implied sources of illumination as well as focal points of visual and physical energy. When the mandalas appear below the horizon, reflected in bodies of water, for instance, they demonstrate that sources of light can be found anywhere and everywhere.

This visual, conceptual, and emotional California is, as the show’s title suggests, inseparable from dreaming—especially given the state’s gravitational pull on generations who have gone there to pursue their dreams, for better and for worse. Its multi-faceted magnitude has special resonance for Guidi, who grew up in the Californian desert and had formative experiences of being surrounded by the vastness of the mountains.

The paintings in California Dreaming, therefore, represent an organic evolution of both Guidi’s work until this point as well as her life outside of art. Indeed, they are explorations of what it means to be outside while being inside one’s own view of the world; to experience the hidden magnitudes of the interior worlds of imagination and dreams as if they were external landscapes; and to make space for the growth of new perspectives precisely where things are most familiar. Guidi brings a constant sense of immediacy to these explorations, allowing each work to become a celebration of presence before the ever-changing light and moods of nature, as well as the shifting, cyclical, encompassing nature of her own artistic processes.