Born in 1964 in the Cevennes region of southern France, Nathalie Guarracino moved to the United States in 1987. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University where she studied with painters Joan Semmel, Emma Amos and sculptor Gary Kuehn, and where she was awarded the Carolyn Wagenseller first prize for excellence in the visual arts. In 1994, she moved to New York City where she began exhibiting her paintings. Today her work is exhibited and represented in private collections throughout the United States and Europe.
From the quiet nature of the Cevennes mountains where she grew up, to the urban chaos of New York City, her abstract landscapes aim to find a balance between two very divergent and colliding worlds. With a mostly earth-tone palette and through the use of extensive layering which begins with thick impastos recalling the geological strata of the earth, the layers gradually become thinner and increasingly translucent to create a sense of depth through transparency. The reference of the work to the organic and the natural stands in contrast to the endless distractions of a city mesmerized by technology and desiccated by the geometric, the stylized, and the computerized. Her paintings aspire to evoke a state of contemplation and meditation where the viewer, fixed in the experience of the moment, will be compelled to ponder and reflect.
