Guim Tió: Pillow Paintings

François Ghebaly is proud to present Pillow Paintings, Guim Tió’s debut solo exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery.

Barcelona-based painter Guim Tió explores memory and perception in his signature portraits of figures turned away or adrift in imposing landscapes. Working primarily in oil and colored pencil, Tió leads viewers through emotional territories where feelings are inscribed directly into environments.

The paintings in Tió’s latest exhibition Pillow Paintings were created in dialogue with the artist’s reading of Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book, a 11th-century text recording courtly life during the Heian period in Japan. Despite the vast difference in their contexts, Shōnagon and Tió share a remarkable sensitivity to the poetry embedded in small moments, intimate gestures, and vistas briefly glimpsed. Just as Shōnagon’s Pillow Book consists largely of lists (of likes, dislikes, “Elegant Things,” “Things That Should Be Short,” etcetera), Tió, himself a lifelong listmaker, organizes his exhibition as a list, where each painting serves as an exploration of a subject that holds personal significance for the artist. 

Several ideas recur throughout the exhibition: solitary figures, sleepers, wanderers moving through vast landscapes. Tió’s paintings often begin with images, which the artist finds in art history, his collections of found photographs and postcards, or his own travels. These images do not serve as visual references, but rather as an archive of feelings which Tió draws upon to create his work. Across shifts in scale from the domestic to the geological, each of Tió’s paintings seeks to suspend the modern rhythms of production and accumulation. Alone or together, in nature or in dreams, Tió’s figures pause to take their pleasure, in a book or in one another. Pillow Paintings enumerates these small moments, creating a catalog of personal meaning out of the interstices of the everyday. The viewer is invited to pause in turn, to stop and slow down, to look closely.

Guim Tió (b. 1987) holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona in Spain. He has participated in several solo and group shows including Alzueta Gallery, Madrid, Barcelona; Artside Gallery, Seoul; More Museum, Gorssel, Netherlands and Marrakech Biennale, Morocco. He is the cofounder of Banana Books, a publisher of artists’ books and editions.