Part French, Australian, and English, 23-year-old recent graduate Olivia Guillot held her first solo show ‘Swallowed A Fly’, at Phoenix Art Space in Brighton in July 2024.

When painting, Guillot enters an introspective plane of unrestrained emotion, memory, and play. Embracing intuition and impulsivity, she is first led by her senses and materials: paint, surface, colours, and brushes become engines for her emotion and energy.

Guillot never plans her pieces; the act of painting instead becomes an unpredictable, active and open conversation between herself and the canvas. This exchange is both thrilling and anxiety-inducing, as each responds and reacts to the other in an intense back-and-forth, unsure of when it will end or if it will lead anywhere.

The absurdity of human behaviour is a theme which frequently surfaces when Guillot is painting: indeterminate, weird, gimmicky figures appear—often consuming one another, vomiting, or pointing . These semi-recognisable characters emerge organically during the process, being drawn out of abstract marks which have instinctively been laid down. In this manner, figures, forms and narratives are found and lost, evolving with the painting as it progresses. The artist explores the intersection of where chance meets intent, material meets image, and abstraction meets figuration. Guillot plays with these shifting dynamics, toying with the multiple ways an image can communicate or come into being.

The final pieces exist in a liminal space of uncertainties, of what-ifs: forms and figures are suggested, but not certain; multiple possible narratives move across the canvas in flux, but none are set: the viewer is taunted with hints of recognisable visual information without being provided with a single resolution; ultimately, the paintings encourage the audience to continually search and wonder within the free, indeterminate space which lies between abstraction and representation.