Color Plane Stacks, 2013
Acrylic on wood panel 24 × 36 inches, 18 × 24 inches, 36 × 48 inches
The Color Plane Stacks are where Garcia's painting practice begins. Working in cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, the palette of commercial printing, these early paintings establish from the outset that color here will be a system before it is a sensation. The forms are flat, hard-edged, and deliberate: rectangular planes stacked vertically into configurations that read as architectural, almost monumental, while their edges periodically dissolve into waves and biomorphic curves that the geometry cannot quite contain.
That tension between the ruled and the flowing is not a problem the paintings are solving. It is the first question the practice asks, and one it will continue asking across the following decade. The stacked forms suggest buildings, or glyphs, or both at once, hovering at the threshold between abstract structure and legible sign in a way that will resurface years later in the architectural vases of the still lifes and the gateway formations of the drawings.
What is not yet present is the gradient. These are flat planes, color stated rather than modulated, form defined by edge rather than by the movement of light across a surface. That discovery is still ahead. But the architecture that will eventually carry those gradients, the stacked logic, the systemic palette, the deliberate collision of geometric and organic form, is fully established here, at the beginning.
