Harmonic Oscillation
M.A. Guevara
November 6th – 28th
Curated by Hugo Cervantes
Opening reception, November 6th 5pm-8pm
(Masks are required to enter HRLA)
HRLA is open by appointment and Friday-Sunday from 12-5pm.
Harmony is not static perfection. Harmony is a forging of many to achieve unison. It’s amalgamation is often brutal, antagonistic, and at it’s best transformative blurring the lines between where one ends and the other begins. For the artist M. A. Guevara, harmony like alchemy is a task of precision and repetition, where one harmonic blast makes way for the next one, identifying and refining the harmony’s rhythmic, visual, or sensual sequence.
It is a process present in Guevara’s self-portraits, writings, videos, and paintings, where layering images and textures together crystalize into opaque images referencing personal histories to seismic hedonistic fantasies and critical critique. Guevara’s portraiture often bloat and swell the face incorporating mesoamerican motifs to overstressed facial features speaking to the dysmorphic culture of racial capitalism and its enduring legacy of pain. His interest in the limits of continuity and legibility emanate throughout his oeuvre drawn to the continuous patterns of hedonism and gratification, stoicism and sentimentality, and death and creation.
For his debut solo exhibition Harmonic Oscillation at Human Resources-Los Angeles M. A. Guevara has forged a new set of works further illustrating his studies in texture and self-portraiture veering between personal history and staunch critique. Together the works constellate a consistent searching, dismantling, and fortification of oneself with a mission of moving beyond fixed cycles of life and death. In lieu M.A. Guevera orbits towards the bend and curve of cycles preferring their constant becoming as a point of departure in his work.
M. A. Guevara (b. 1997, Inland Empire, CA) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work comprises the fields of portraiture: painting, writing, and film. He is the author of the short stories Peacock, Gusano, and Fatherless. His writings are held at institutions like LACA (Los Angeles Contemporary Archive.) Guevara has shown work with Dirty Looks, Coaxial, Tom of Finland Foundation, and Gamma Galeria Guadalajara. He is a recipient of Human Resources-LA’s 2020 time, money, space residency.