Ismael Guardado: Between Sign and Matter

G2 Gallery presents Between Sign and Matter, an exhibition of works by Mexican artist Ismael Guardado spanning screenprint, painting, and painted stone. Bringing together works from different periods and formats, the exhibition considers the visual language that runs throughout Guardado’s practice: one shaped by recurring signs, material experimentation, and the movement between image, object, and sound. At the center of the exhibition is Ollesta, a body of screenprints developed around the form of the pot. Present across ancient civilizations and Mesoamerican cultures, the vessel is approached not only as a functional object, but also as a sign, instrument, and repository of memory. Guardado reduces and reconfigures its form through circles, bars, perforations, and repeated marks. These gestures create a sense of rhythm across the paper, suggesting a connection to music without attempting to illustrate sound directly. The Ollesta works are presented in dialogue with a large-scale oil painting whose layered figures and architectural forms create an ambiguous, compressed space. Images emerge and recede within the composition, establishing a tension between recognition and abstraction. Rather than presenting a fixed scene, the painting unfolds through partial figures, gestures, and shifts in scale. The stone, produced between the 1990s and 2000s, extends this language onto a different material. Painted directly on an irregular stone surface, its figures and geometric markings adapt to the object’s natural contours. The work brings together the physical weight and history of stone with a graphic vocabulary that feels both archaeological and contemporary. Across these works, Guardado does not treat each medium as an independent category. Screenprint, painting, and stone become different grounds for a broader investigation: how images carry cultural memory, how signs shift across materials, and how the hand can transform an inherited form without fixing its meaning. Sign and Matter offers a focused view of an artistic practice shaped by movement between disciplines. What connects the works is not a single narrative, but a sustained attention to rhythm, repetition, material, and the changing life of images.