Lulu Guequirre: On Painting As Translation
Introduction and interview by Sophie Dixon, with Callum Ellis-Mennie
Photography by Callum Ellis-Mennie and Pablo
April 21st 2026
I met Lulu Guequierre in 2020. At the time Lulu was just starting to get into tattooing, which then fully took off in 2023. Among many of our friends at the time, there was a feeling of parallel, and budding, practices in new and different mediums. Montreal-based artists still in school, or recent graduates, edging into an unknown creative discipline, or figuring out the logistics of using your home as a painting studio or wood-shop. I ended up trading a sweater I’d made for one of Lulu’s earlier paintings, on un-stretched canvas, which will always be a centrepiece in my living room, apartment to apartment. Now Lulu’s painting style has evolved into these half-dreamy, fuzzy-soft renders; mixtures of memories that connect and collide, with short fractures of poetry and other found literary text as base reference. On a balmy spring day in Lulu’s studio apartment, surrounded by the paintings, I sit down to speak with Lulu and her good friend Callum about the recent changes in her work, the influence of text and experiential fragments, and the act of translation.
Sophie Dixon
Lulu Guequirre: I’ve been thinking a lot about this shift in my practice. Right now, I’m interested more in translation, using fragments of texts and turning literature into paintings. Representing these fragments on a visual plain, and allowing them to pass through me as a filter, and considering all of my own experiences too. I studied literature and still read a lot, so I will read and record little fragments that conjure something visual, or something that I want to follow, and then I take that to the canvas - like even just a phrase, or a poem - and I don’t plan things out, but I just sort of let the painting be smarter than me. It’s pretty free-form on the canvas. I add layers and layers and layers that are all kind of stemming generally from the fragment of text. So that’s been really exciting! I think through this kind of abstraction, of having the spark of the text, I’m able to have way more fun painting.
S: I really noticed this shift in your work, it’s somehow so visible, this move toward these more almost impressionist, Chagall-esk canvases. Can you take us through an example of a snippet of text that has given you a place to make work from?
L: Eros the Bittersweet, by Anne Carson, is her dissertation on desire, and desire is something that I think about a lot. One of my recent paintings is inspired by this entire fragment from this book, which is very open and there’s a lot of room for play.
Callum Ellis-Mennie: That’s kind of what Carson does with her translations. With the Sapphic fragments, you have a poem which could be about any number of things. In some of the lines, you get a word here, maybe two words there, a big blank space, and then one word at the end. She’s driven some meaning from it that’s probably not what Sappho originally intended. So the translation is through Sappho, through Carson, through Lulu [laughs].
L: I also love how it reminds me of the Derridean concept of play, like how he talks about the play of words, as when a word can mean multiple things. An example could be the word “play” itself, as in “to play a game” or to reenact theatrically as a “play”. That added flexibility is kind of the space around the words and the fragments too, even though she’s interpreting them.
C: The other thing that’s interesting with Sappho, is the context of these love songs. They’re 6th-7th Century wedding songs, on a Greek island - a completely different cultural context. There’s the language, and then there’s the world that surrounds the language, which we don’t really have access to. So we filter it through our world and we take its meaning for what is contextualized through our experience. And I think what Carson’s really good at is how much she leaves open for meaning.
C: I wonder how much Carson’s translations are actually more open to possibility, or whether it’s just the contemporariness. I think you write your own time into whatever you’re translating.
L: That’s a good point. I believe that any translation is issuing an argument for how something should be looked at. And I would say she’s really well informed, especially in her knowledge of ancient Greek texts. Looking at her analysis of the formal style of this poem in ancient Greek times, and also building her argument about the poem itself.
C: She’s a classicist.
L: Here is the poem that I started with for this one painting, “As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch - high on the highest branch and the apple pickers forgot - well no they didn’t forget - were not able to reach.” And that’s the entire poem.
C: And where do you work from that? Does it bring about an image into your mind, or do you limit yourself to that little fragment?
S: I feel in your work there’s really this sense of a spacial, almost world-building, quality that happens. You’re kind of fleshing out the crevices of that space, like temporally and physically. Do you see that as a kind of home-building? Or what’s your relationship to fashioning that spacial quality.
L: I think it’s changing overtime. I think for much of my life I didn’t really feel that I fit into the world that was being defined for me; by external factors
S: It’s like a space that just feels real, and human. Or makes you feel like you exist, hah. Let’s talk about Clarice Lispector!
L: I love Clarice Lispector. She’s one of those writers who talks about discomfort and strangeness - the uncanny. She writes in a way that is kind of comforting and familiar, which is a really hard thing to do.
S: It’s not necessarily about double meanings, or hidden meanings, it’s more about the morph-ability of language and that it can make one feel understood. There’s something really generous in this, as Lispector writes, for the reader it feels like such a gift.
L: In appropriating things, she almost writes around them. It’s always moving. Thinking about language in this way, when meaning is created relationally, it actually gives me possibility and hope of survival. A lot of times it’s hard to pinpoint what the stakes are of thinking outside or around the perceived limitations of language - or a visual language - and I do think what’s at stage is survival. I do need to make my world visible.
S: Somethings we’ve been speaking about a lot is that Derridean threshold space, or that space of ambiguity. Part of what makes that space so interesting - and progressive - is its dealing with the “other”, and making the “other” a subject who is no longer foreign. The way that happens is the ambiguity allowing for that uncertainty, of division or categorization, therefore dissolving the boundaries or barriers between subjects.
L: One criticism of Derridean thinking, in this sense, it that it’s not very actionable. It’s more of a thinking exercise. But I guess when I paint it’s kind of putting that active element into place. I like to think of paintings as being kind of forever ongoing and never finished, and I think that helps to allow for an acceptance of that uncertainty, or ambiguity. I think it keeps the paintings alive, and it’s also maybe another way to challenge the idea of even needing a finished “product”.
C: Are the works literately never finished? Do you come back to old works?
L: I do, sometimes years later.
S: That seems to kind of go hand in hand with the way you work in your notebooks and sketch, it’s like a timeless bounty of work.
C: A lot of your older paintings really felt like snapshots of a certain time. I remember you used to put diary entries into them, or there would be multiple pictures in one. It almost looked like a page ripped from a notebook. But now I feel like they’re a little more atomic in their concept. Why do you think there’s been that change in your painting?
L: When I was working in that way, I found that focusing too much on myself - like the people in my like or things that I was doing. There were a lot of portraits, or layered portraits with text, and drawing a lot of connections between specific people, or what they mean to me. Seeing these little moments of beauty. I then realized that I was starting to take myself way too seriously, I wasn’t really having fun anymore. It kind of became a formula, which was limiting. It would start to kind of stress me out to paint. This past summer, when I was in Berlin at a residency, was when it really changed for me. I really pushed myself to the limit of that, I was kind of scared to paint. I didn’t really want to do it. That also coincided with the realization that I need to write more about my work, and that was really the limit of what I could say from that particular style I was in. I read an interview with this great Berlin-based artist, Lunita July-Dorn, where she was speaking about how intuitive and non-formulaic it feels for her to create. Her paintings are way more figurative than mine, but I really loved that idea and took inspiration to bring that more into my work. I know that my reading practice and my painting practice are kind of the same for me, and it’s really hard to explain that and I realized that I wasn’t really making the kind of paintings that I wanted to make.
C: What was your first painting after you had that realization?
L: It was this one, which is called “Marseille Fragment 1”. It was still originally based on an experience I had, but I didn’t work from reference at all, I tried to let the representation [of the figures] emerge from this more intuitive approach. It’s a painting about forgiveness [laughs], it’s kind of about these guys that mugged me and my wife when we were in Marseille. It was a really scary experience, and it was really humiliating and we were kind of really fucked after that because we had no money. It was just really this whole bad thing that had happened. And I was thinking about it and I realized I really want to paint that. Then I realized while I was painting that I really wasn’t upset about it anymore, and I found some compassion and beauty in it while I was painting it. And also having fun!
C: Do you see this painting as also being from a fragment?
L: Yes, because this experience really was just this little piece. This is funny but I feel like my life is like a piece of pottery that’s been shattered, and then I just have these little pieces, and the little pieces are what I use to paint. In making that piece in particular, I was reading parts of my diary from that day to paint from. I think really I was trying to take this painful experience and make something beautiful, I think that was the best revenge [laughs]. Thinking about the fact that the boundary, or the idea of the boundary that separates you from the other is also what binds you together. It’s not just a boundary, it’s also a connective thing.