THE PHANTOM

Like a hidden Micky, the phantom figure often appears in Guzman’s work. The artist first created the abstract character by chance during the execution of a performance art piece. The performance, which was inspired by an evening when the artist was stabbed in an uptown bar, featured Guzman acting as the hands of a clock, forming a large charcoal ring around him. As he created the ring, the artist simultaneously marked time by expressively slashing a scrap of Givenchy promotional material at his feet with the charcoal.  The resulting (vaguely triangular) linear abstraction, now known as the phantom, has come to signify the presence of good and evil, dark and light, yin and yang when and wherever it emerges in the artist’s work. “The phantom was created when I got a second chance at life, so the phantom represents that first life,” says Guzman of his haunting signature, “But it’s still a part of me, it’s always with me. Like the good and the bad, you can’t know one without the other. The phantom is all about that kind of duality.” For more on the origin story of the phantom, see interview below.

“Guzman’s narrative, a story assembled in shards - entireties forever incomplete, conjuring like constellations where representation is a kind of connect the dots along the abject periphery of abstraction, is a shamanic storytelling befitting urban myth. His comic book reinvention of self, complete with a tragic-heroic alter ego The Phantom whose painful origin story based off a life-changing incident in which the artist had his face brutally sliced open in an uptown bar, is itself a cipher, a perpetual retracing of the cut, emblazoned as a sign reduced to a logo, Zorro’s mark reconstituted into the vernacular of graffiti, a tag whose very I was here presence connotes a converse gesture of absence.” Excerpted from exhibition essay by Carlo McCormick. Read full essay here.