Ana Guerrero: Painting Inner Time in Contemporary Abstraction

by Manuel Bonilla Rius for And-Art Works Magazine

The Studio as a Creative Threshold

When I first encountered a work by Ana Guerrero, it was in her studio. Not hung, not presented, but still inhabiting that space that exists before interpretation, where painting breathes before being seen. There was silence. And there was time. In that environment—closer to an emotional geography than to a physical place—it became clear that her painting is not created to be explained, but to be experienced.

There, the work did not present itself as a finished image, but as a presence. A presence that does not demand immediate attention, yet steadily invites it. That first encounter—a painting that reveals itself slowly—is essential to understanding her practice.

Guerrero develops a pictorial practice rooted in contemporary abstraction, where time, material, and inner experience function as constant guiding elements. Not as theoretical concepts, but as lived components within the act of painting itself.

Painting Not as Gesture, but as a Pictorial State

In Guerrero’s work, gesture is not a forceful statement, but a sustained condition. Each layer responds to a contemplative, almost physical decision, where the material does not dominate the surface, but engages in dialogue with it. Oil paint thickens, is scraped back, covered, and revealed again. Time becomes embedded in the surface.

Her process is built through the superimposition of layers and a direct relationship with oil paint understood as a living material. There is no urgency here, no intention of immediate visual impact. The painting takes shape through the accumulation of moments: pauses, revisions, silences.

From this process emerges a distinctive tension between control and intuition. A delicate balance that places her work in a space where expressionism loses intensity and gains inward depth.

Colour as Emotional Memory

The ochres, muted yellows, deep reds, and softened whites that run through her work do not function as decorative chromatic choices, but as active memory. They recall earth, walls, erosion—what remains when excess has fallen away.

Rather than constructing recognisable scenes, Guerrero creates atmospheres. Colour does not describe; it evokes. Through this evocation, a personal experience is activated for the viewer. Each work maintains its own emotional temperature, a vibration that shifts with light, distance, and time spent in its presence.

Surface, Depth, and Visual Suspension

Formally, her compositions avoid an obvious centre. The eye moves across the surface, encountering areas of resistance, zones of density, and more open spaces. There is something archipelagic in her pictorial structure: fragments that coexist without fully merging.

This organisation creates a sense of suspension. The works neither advance nor retreat; they remain. And within this state of stillness lies much of their strength. They are not narrative images, but experiential fields onto which the viewer projects their own internal rhythm.

Looking Slowly: A Reflection for the Contemporary Collector

Ana Guerrero’s painting is of particular interest to collectors seeking a lasting emotional relationship with contemporary painting. Not through immediate visual impact, but through prolonged coexistence with the work.

In a visual context saturated with rapid stimuli, this kind of painting proposes a different mode of engagement: slowing down, accepting ambiguity, allowing the work to unfold over time. It is not about understanding, but about inhabiting.

Collecting, in this sense, ceases to be an act of external affirmation and becomes an intimate experience. When such a work enters a space, it does not define it instantly; it accompanies it. And it is within this quiet companionship that painting reveals its true dimension.

The inner time of painting.