Exedra Fantasma No. 1–5
2021 Acrylic on aluminum bowls
An exedra is a classical form, a semicircular recess designed for gathering, for conversation, for stillness. Fantasma is what inhabits it. Together the title locates these five painted aluminum vessels somewhere between architecture and apparition.
The bowls vary in form: circular, elongated oval, each raised on a base of aluminum fins or legs that lift the vessel into something between container and sculpture. The rims and stands are left raw, brushed metal against painted black interiors, a material contrast that is as considered as anything inside the bowl. That interior darkness is new in Garcia's practice, a ground that makes the painted marks read as light rather than pigment.
Inside each vessel the full vocabulary is present. Several bowls carry the gradient language of the abstract paintings in its most concentrated form, bands of yellow through red through blue following the curve of the aluminum as though the vessel itself generated the color. Others hold the floral forms, petals radiating from the center of a circular bowl with the same radial symmetry that runs through the drawings, the concave surface now focusing the composition inward rather than outward.
That inward turn is what distinguishes Exedra Fantasma from the paintings made in the same year. Where the Palm Leaf canvases reach upward and outward, these vessels contain. The vases in the still lifes hold stems; the bowls hold light. The question of what a container is, and what it is for, runs through both bodies of work simultaneously, arrived at from different directions.
