The Deceptive Minimalism of Léonie Guyer at House of Seiko

Every morning, when Léonie Guyer enters her studio, she tries to trick herself.

“Before I cross the threshold,” she says excitedly, her face animated by the thought, “I try to trick myself into thinking that I’ve never been there before. So, when I first see the work inside, I don’t think of it as my work. It’s just the work, and every time I’m seeing it, it’s the first time.”

Guyer’s paintings require tremendous sensitivity before they can come into existence. The shapes that she captures in her works feel preexistent, more like forms she’s been patiently waiting to encounter than representations or expressions of inner thoughts.

Three and Three and One, Guyer’s show at House of Seiko, is made up of three watercolors, three paintings on marble and a modest wall drawing painted on-site. The last feels the most alive, perhaps because its simple ovular shape is rendered in dappled shades of crimson. The gentle painting, semi-opaque against the gallery’s wall, seems to pull texture up into its body, drawing out the qualities of wood still preserved beneath the white paint.

Material histories

There is a bravery to the simplicity of Guyer’s paintings. Each appears to use only a single color; the strokes she makes on her chosen “canvases” are humble in size. The three watercolors on display, gray with oscillating warm and cold tones, enclose diluted expanses of color in tenuous outlines. Their boundaries are both discrete and gentle, vaguely reminiscent of a shark sack, the semi-translucent rectangular capsule that provides a shell for a shark’s embryo. In one watercolor, the form comes to a sharp horn on the side.

Her compositions are intimately bound with the material on which she paints. The paper for the watercolors, for example, lived in her studio for 21 years before she felt ready to mark it. During those years, the material wasn’t forgotten, but acted as an ever-present companion, occupying its place in the room as a silent collaborator. As if speaking about an old friend, Guyer happily recounts first encountering the double weight Indian jute paper at the art store New York Central in the early 2000s. With admiration, she describes the traditional process of shaping and drying it.

Histories like these are nestled into Guyer’s practice. And San Francisco, Guyer’s home of nearly 50 years, is foundational to her deceptively minimalist pieces. Since moving from Long Island to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, Guyer has been a stalwart Bay Area community member.

‘Lines like writing’

While she adamantly identifies as a painter, poetry plays a central role for the artist. She’s often provided a visual counterpart to the work poets do with words: freeing the image from the burden of narrative. In 2011, she collaborated with Bill Berkson, matching drawings to his monograph Not An Exit, put out by Jungle Garden Press.

At House of Seiko, the works on marble, monochromatic paintings crisp against the stone’s mottled grays, can be understood in relation to another community close to Guyer’s heart. Though made in 2024, the marble pieces remind me of Gift, a 2006 site-based exhibition in which Guyer painted her signature forms on the top floor of a Shaker building, the historic 1829 Brethren’s Workshop in New Lebanon, New York.

Guyer first encountered Shaker gift drawings at San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, during a sweeping group show they’d hung salon-style. The gift drawing was high, high on the wall and semi-obscured by its position. “I’d never seen anything like it,” she recalls, “the lines look like writing. I could hardly tell what it looked like, but I felt the radiation off the page. It was humming.”

When she inquired about the piece, the gallery assistant demurred, chancing that the origins were totally unknown. As this was well before the internet, the encounter lived inside the artist’s mind for a long time, tenured in memory, until New York City’s Drawing Center mounted Heavenly Visions, a show of gift drawings and gift songs, in 2001.

Years after that, the artist Sarah Cain, a student of Guyer’s at SFAI, recognized the images in a lecture and connected Guyer with the Shaker Museum, where Cain’s mother coincidentally worked. The experience with the Shaker aesthetic became so important to her practice that when the Wattis Institute mounted form in the realm of, a 2018 exhibition of Guyer’s work, they even procured a few actual gift drawings for an introductory vitrine.

The decorative, handmade gift drawings present language more for its aesthetic qualities than for its meaning. They remind me of how talking is so often less about communicating than keeping someone company. Easy, meaningless chatter does the difficult work of assuring someone “Yes, I am here, I am with you. I’m listening.” The Shaker gift drawings are like that: illustrations of small talk replete in its generosity.

Guyer’s paintings don’t talk, but they do populate space emphatically enough to offer a kind of companionship. The Susan Howe poems included in a booklet made for the House of Seiko show seem to vibrate in agreement.

Ancient symbols

Another touchstone for the artist is the Mycenean figurines of ancient Greece. These relics’ simple shapes adhere to a few stylistic properties. The Mycenean bird goddess, for example, always has a long stem and a small squat face that sits above a flattened ceramic circle gesturing at wings.

There’s one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that Guyer visits often, sometimes using her recent status as a Guggenheim Fellow to access the exhibition in the off-hours. Its body is striped with simple brown paint, and defined by bowing curvature that leaves a trace of the hands that molded its shape, lending the ceramic an organic, living quality.

Much like her own work, the Mycenean bird goddesses feel symbolic; they adhere to their own secret shorthand. Both her work and the figurines jump out of time, essential and audacious, refusing to be pinned to any specific context. Instead, they feel constantly at home in the present, almost already familiar to the viewer.

“Form has a meaning — but it is a meaning entirely its own,” writes the 20th-century art historian Henri Focillon in The Life of Forms in Art, a foundational text for Guyer that shines a specific light on her practice.

Bodies of pure, essential feeling

The artist’s oblique, careful paintings turn simple shapes into bodies of pure, essential feeling. Her forms share a consistent style, patterned by their own hidden rules. I offer these considerations of gift drawings and Mycenean figures as just one way to look through Guyer’s works at the interior logic of the universe from which they spring.

The imagist poet H.D. says we must be in love before we can understand the mysteries of vision. We must begin with the sympathy of thought. This intimacy feels alive in Guyer’s work. Each piece is nonrepresentational, it does not point away, or towards something else, but instead pulls the viewer inwards — towards itself, closer.

The vitality of Guyer’s work resists interpretation. In this way, her paintings offer the viewer a new encounter, every time.

‘Three and Three and One’ is on view at House of Seiko (3109 22nd St., San Francisco).