artists

SERVANDO GARCIA
Download Resume

Servando’s paintings and drawings are comprised from personal photographs, including those taken directly from media related sources, such as television screens and computer monitors. His work often deals with domestic scenarios and his interest in experiences of unreality, the argument that takes place in the viewer’s mind when they are presented with an unstable, or irrational, yet convincing representation of reality.

In ColorRoom, the viewer is confronted with an intense and confusing representation of a multi-colored shower curtain reflected in a double mirror. As the painting pulls the viewer into its realistic sense of space, its lack of foreground (the only hint of foreground is in the mirror behind the viewer,) simultaneously denies entry. As one deals with this conundrum the confusion becomes greater still as the logic of reflection falls apart between respective bands of color. From top down incongruence slowly occurs between the colored stripes of the curtain and their reflections in the mirrors until the whole picture seems to be serving some ulterior motive.

The idea of irrational fear, of being trapped, caught, or victimized by inanimate objects is one that occurs often in Servando’s work. In 8, a large graphite drawing, the sincerity of a semi-inflated children’s pool is rendered questionable. The large cartoon-like blades of grass are so thoroughly pushed to be real grass that they go beyond style into a realm of deception, setting the stage for a menacing, untrustworthy kiddy-pool.

More recently Servando has begun to mimic the double-vision distortion of television transmission. The paintings of figures and houses are fully graspable, cognitively and emotionally, but they physically deny access giving the viewer a dreamlike sense of unreality.

Servando Garcia was born in 1976, in California. Earning his B.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, he has had much success exhibiting with the Togonon Gallery. Servando received an Artist Grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2005, and is currently living and working in Chicago.