Hilario Gutierrez has always identified with the spirit of the American Southwest. When he visited the Monument Valley, he was inspired by the monumental natural wonders and desert landscape and that’s when he realized his calling was to paint. Gutierrez possesses an innate awareness of the fragile balance and quiet struggle of the Sonoran Desert. His abstract style expresses the harmony in the desert's chaotic emotion of color, form and line. Emotion is the soul of his work; and he is inspired by the man-made and natural architecture of the landscape of Arizona.
He studied the works of other artists such as Dan Namingha and Gerhard Richter in order to develop his technique of layering and subtracting conjoined colors. This enabled him to create a diversity of subjective and non-subjective images within his distinctive surfaces. Gutierrez believes the eye can touch an image and reveal sensation. Because he creates conjoined colors, there is no separation of one color to the next. His works are executed by layering and removing pigments and glazes with tools such as squeegees and palette knives, which gives the surface its' texture and allows the viewer to "look inside." Thus, his work evokes different emotions depending on one's closeness to the canvas. His art is found in public and corporate collections including Shell Commercial, Scottsdale Arizona, Ronald McDonald House, St. Regis Hotel, Vancouver, Alliance Bernstein LP, New York City, McDonalds Corporation, San Diego, University of Chicago, Ocean Club, Laguna Beach, California, and UBS, Dallas.
