Maria Girgenti reviews Magalie Guérin: re at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, on view through October 11, 2014.

Girgenti writes: "Within Guérin’s artistic process, there is a journey that remains visible on the surfaces of her finished paintings. The artist begins with a form she has referenced as a variety of different objects: a chair, an organ, a hat and also, as she told Bad at Sports last year, 'a structural form onto which I apply the paint.' Upon, throughout and around this shape, she builds her compositions. She changes the colors, she rotates the figures, she sands down the surfaces—all in a continuous effort to explore and exploit the aforesaid shape. As our eyes travel throughout her canvases, we find ourselves immersed within not only her methodical depictions but also the palpable time she has spent scrutinizing their process of development. Her creative relationship with the specific form and its surrounding elements is evolving; first she turns it inside out, then she twirls it around, and finally she makes it stand still."