Always using painting as a representational medium, Guilisasti creates large-scale multipart painted installations. Her works explore ideas of discontinuity, fracture, contradiction, and historical anachronism. This seven-canvas exhibition takes its cue from Charles Darwin’s travels through South America. Titled Souvenir, each of the seven unframed canvases depicts one species that Darwin described as an anthropological curiosity. For instance, one of the themes evokes the story of Jemmy Button - the native Yaghan from Tierra del Fuego who was brought to
England by Captain Fitzroy in HMS Beagle and became an anthropological celebrity. The paintings do not hang on the wall as a menagerie of curiosities might: instead, they rest unframed organized as one would organize a series of chronicles. The painted image is a replica of Darwin’s representations. Guilisasti appropriated and shaped the image into determined consumable souvenirs. The depiction –of an owl or of Jemmy Button within
others- is placed on a ceramic cup and like a souvenir, to be bought and consumed. Though Guilisasti paints her seven paintings in the dry style of the naturalist painters, she
does not create naturalist paintings in the descriptive sense, with brilliant colours: instead, she reduces her palette to black and white, with no sheen at all, and there, the still life –of
Darwin’s species—quite simply becomes a painting of objects. Methodologically, Guilisasti puts herself through the exercise of painting the model as Darwin understood it, ultimately losing sight of the original point of reference and situating the gaze of the artistin some anonymous place. Lending the object a de-naturalized identity.

Cecilia Brunson