I Will Never Stop Loving You

Animated digital painting. A young man stands at the threshold of a house on fire. He has not moved, he will not move. His back is to the viewer, his body still against a burning doorway that fills the night in orange and molten yellow, and the only thing alive in this painting is the fire itself, churning in the open frame of the door while everything else, holds perfectly, permanently still.

That is the structure of the work and the structure of the feeling it carries.

Guerroa paints the surrounding yard in deep, cold green, the house in a blue that runs the length of the facade and into the figure's shirt, making the man and the building the same thing, inseparable, fused by years of returning to the same door. The fire pours through the open frame, lights the ground beneath his feet, catches the edges of him. He stands inside its warmth without going in.

The painting is about passion and desire and loss, three things that arrive together and leave in different directions. The house is memory. The fire is what memory does when it is fed long enough. The man at the door knows there is no one left inside. He stands there anyway. He will stand there, the title says, forever.

Love that outlasts its object does not diminish. It burns. It burns and burns and the man before it does not run, because running would mean admitting that the fire will eventually go out.