I came across Hulda Guzmán’s work for the first time at Turner Contemporary in Margate, and it felt like a surprisingly refreshing discovery. Please awake – asked Nature kindly is Guzmán’s first European institutional exhibition and brings together a decade of her work, from intimate interiors and studio scenes to expansive, dreamlike landscapes.
My first reaction was to the sheer lightness of the paintings. They are lush, colourful and full of life — tropical vegetation, fruits, birds, animals, people and strange mythical creatures all existing together. There is something almost intoxicating about the abundance of it. The paintings seem to offer an escape into a paradise where nature is everywhere and everything is alive.
But the longer I spent with the work, the more that paradise began to feel less like an escape and more like a place where something else was being revealed.
Turner Contemporary describes Guzmán’s landscapes as places of mysticism and ecological consciousness, where nature is not simply a background but an active force. Her own surroundings in the rainforest mountains of Samaná in the Dominican Republic are central to her visual language. Her paintings bring together the natural world, family, animals and mythical beings, creating a reality that feels both recognisable and dreamlike. There is a wonderful sense that the boundaries between the inner and outer worlds have become blurred.
And this is where my own interpretation of the exhibition began to emerge.
I kept thinking about ourselves — about the parts of ourselves we carry wherever we go. We might imagine an ideal paradise filled with lush greenery, freedom, beauty and abundance, but we don’t necessarily leave ourselves behind when we enter it. Whatever we are, our fears, desires, memories, contradictions and darker sides come with us.
This became particularly powerful for me when I encountered Be kind to your demons (Until next time) from 2018. The “demons” in Guzmán’s work are recurring strange and sometimes unsettling creatures, and they have been interpreted as figures connected to the psyche, folklore and the unseen world. In the series Be Kind to Your Demons, Guzmán explores the idea of embracing the devil within ourselves rather than simply trying to reject it.
For me, however, the idea reached beyond that one painting.
I began seeing it throughout the exhibition.
The people, animals, mythical beings and overwhelming natural environments started to feel like different parts of an inner landscape. The lushness becomes almost psychological. The jungle is beautiful, but it is also dense and mysterious. The creatures can be playful, protective or unsettling. People appear immersed in nature rather than separate from it.
Perhaps this is why the title Please awake – asked Nature kindly stayed with me. It feels like a gentle request to pay attention — not only to nature outside ourselves, but to what is happening within us. Guzmán herself describes the title as an invitation to listen more closely to the subtle shifts of light and time that shape both landscape and self.
There is something particularly moving about that connection.
We often think of paradise as somewhere we need to reach — somewhere beyond our present circumstances where everything will finally feel right. Guzmán’s paintings made me think instead that perhaps paradise and the things we fear can exist in the same place. The beauty does not have to cancel out the darkness.
And perhaps that is what Be Kind to Your Demons means to me.
We spend so much time trying to get rid of the parts of ourselves that make us uncomfortable. We want to be calmer, better, happier, more acceptable. But what if those parts are not something to destroy? What if they are simply part of us — and what we need is not to defeat them, but to understand them?
This is only my personal reading of Guzmán’s work, but it is what I carried with me through the exhibition. I found myself returning again and again to the relationship between the lush external world and the complicated internal one.
Guzmán’s paintings are joyful without being shallow, mystical without feeling distant, and beautiful without allowing beauty to be the whole story. Beneath the colour and abundance is a quiet invitation to look again — at nature, at ourselves, and at the strange creatures we carry with us.
Maybe we don’t need to leave our demons behind to find paradise.
Maybe we just need to learn to live with them.
And perhaps, occasionally, to be kind to them.