AGENTIC FORESTS

Agentic Forests is a series of large-scale pictures in acrylic on white gessoed linen that depict primal forest ecosystems in exhaustive detail and present the forest as agentic: a subject, not an object, that exceeds human comprehension. Most environmental talk reduces the natural world to a resource — something to protect or something to extract. These works instead embody our entanglement with the living world and our estrangement from it in the same frame.

Over the past fifteen years, Guariglia has worked among primal old growth forests around the world, recording them inch by inch through a process that captures then collapses dozens of exposures into a single sliced plane of space and time. The result is a visual density approaching an etching or woodblock print. He then shifts each picture into the ultraviolet, flooding the field with violets, cyans, magentas, and spectral whites. The gesture references the ultraviolet-sensitive vision of birds and insects and renders the forest as another Umwelt — a world outside our own.

The largest works are murals thirteen feet in height or length, their foliage close to the scale of the human body, so that to face one is to stand at the edge of the forest itself. Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington (2026) is a dense network of white forms that cascade and germinate across the surface, tinged with purple. The field has no center and no edge — it's ontologically flat. The forest becomes uncannily familiar — its shapes and structures known — but its complexity feels strangely foreign.

Agency is not ours alone. It runs through everything living and nonliving, each thing shaping the others. The forest senses, communicates, remembers — and in doing so, acts upon everything around it. These pictures do not show a place, they show a presence — an intelligence so vast and so unlike ours that we feel it long before we can comprehend it.

Something this vast and complex can never be taken in at once. It withdraws from us; no single view can contain it whole. Our eyes are only one way of seeing — and what lies beyond them we can still reach for through art. The camera is one such reaching; the shift into ultraviolet, another. Birds and insects see in a range of light closed to us, a reminder that we hold no monopoly on seeing.

The forest is also talking — passing signals between its members and across species, in a language we are still learning to read. Science has only recently confirmed what it long overlooked: that forests sense, communicate, and remember. Guariglia's pictures do not explain any of this. They put you inside it: entangled in a world we belong to yet can barely comprehend. We belong to it more deeply than we know. It is the world that made us, and some part of us remembers it still — even as the whole of it lies beyond our grasp.