Pablo Garcia Lopez

Some writings by other authors about my work :

Michael Gormley:

“Pablo Garcia-Lopez ups the Catholic Baroque quotient with densely woven, need a machete to get through, multi-figure relief pieces that alternately recall Tintoretto’s Paradiso and Dante’s ninth circle of hell crammed into a Joseph Cornell shadow box.
Swirling with cryptic emblems and angles swinging bare-assed on tassels, theseconstructions offer a vision capable of sending Saint Teresa right over the edge andinto an ecstatic swoon. Likely because limits are foreign to Garcia-Lopez, he buddiesup his heaven- on- a- wall reliefs with hybrid chandelier mobiles slapped togetherwith chipped rococo crap and bits of precious metal likely washed up from a long-sunk luxury liner”.



Edwin Rivera:

“To Garcia-Lopez, looking through the unique gaze of the artist-scientist, “the nervous system is baroque.” The auerbach plexus lies within the gastrointestinal tract, and is said to act as the brains for the gut; Garcia-Lopez, a fantastic voyager willingly shrinking himself to a molecular level in order to spy upon the secrets of the body, unveils for us his conception of the mythic metabolism. Here are new flowers and new flesh after Rimbaud: racked, hacked, and suffering– captured in the still from the short film The Coming Age of Military Neuroscience. This is a bit of political theatre that reimagines Goya’s war-torn humans, their limbs deflated over sawn trees, amoebae dissolving in the roil of magma beneath” (Edwin Rivera, https://svathematchfactory.com/featured-artist/pablo-garcia-lopez/)

B. Amore:

“Pablo Garcia Lopez is like a modern day Bernini, sculpting baroque figures in cast natural silk, rather than marble, to create exquisite and contradictory sculptures. Exploiting the sensuousness of spun-silk, he sets that soft fleshiness against the sharp steel of surgical implements to shock and fascinate (B. Amore, Sculpture Magazine)”.

Suzanne Anker:

“Silk-worms have been manipulated in order to produce spider-silk, a very tensile thread.  Additionally, silk worms appear in many recipes as food in many Asian countries, either fried, boiled or roasted.  Pablo Garcia’s use of silk as an art material is quite unique (Image 1).  Forgoing its decorative use in scarfs and robes,  Garcia pairs his silk with  barbeque spikes (Image 3), bandages (Image 3), velvet and even a vaginal speculum (Image 4).  As one more element in his tapestry of matter, this juxtaposition reiterates his iconographic parlance where the sacred is in a dyadic relationship to the profane”.

Charlote Kent:

“The thread gleams in the light. Silk worms once marshalled for royal garments are now adopted by labs for genetic engineering. In this artist’s hands, however, a spool of silk creates stimulating visions uniting past, present, and future. The baroque was a period daunted by crisis with art exploding and exploring new ways of seeing and thinking, channeled as an emblem of an established order even as it broadened perspectives. What’s old is new again; our past is present as we seem to be in a future, boxed in screens, communicating in fragments. Garcia Lopez works explore the varieties of experience, the invisible microscopic order of the mind that disrupts our perceived stability, the history that infuses the stories we produce today and tomorrow” (Charlote Kent, Phd).

Tansy Xiao:

“Pablo Garcia Lopez on the other hand combined microscopic images of brain cells with fragments from Goya’s bleak and haunting Black Paintings that were associated with PTSD, illustrating the weaponization of modern day neuroscience”. (Tansy Xiao, The cured).

Icons and Iconoclasm: The Sacred and the Profane

By Suzanne Anker

Works of art are memory markers, for the artist and his audience. They freeze the moment of expression where the hurricane of thought and emotion collide in unpredictable ways.  They represent time spent, sometimes in solitude, sometimes in the presence of others, and sometimes even in dreams.  They are fleeting experiences in which consciousness is suspended, subsumed by faith, or even fear.Such is the artist’s task, to live in the extreme, where creativity is adorned by discovery.

Pabo Garcia’s highly charged iconography (Image 2, 3, 4, 5) speaks to such dramatic sentiment, where, like in the Baroque era, theatricality trumps the fainthearted.  The drama in his work howls with highly charged iconography.  Capturing the symbolic sources of Catholicism with eccentric materials is at the heart of his idiom. Employing silk as the whipcord of consciousness, he twists and weaves its threadin juxtaposition to more common materials.  The story of mulberry silk itself inserts another narrative into the work as well.

Originating in China, silk–worms were originally farmed by women  to create luxury garments for royalty.  More recently, however, the silk-worm has entered the laboratory as a model organism used for genetic engineering.  Silk-worms have been manipulated in order to produce spider-silk, a very tensile thread.  Additionally, silk worms appear in many recipes as food in many Asian countries, either fried, boiled or roasted.  Pablo Garcia’s use of silk as an art material is quite unique (Image 1).  Forgoing its decorative use in scarfs and robes,  Garcia pairs his silk with  barbeque spikes (Image 3), bandages (Image 3), velvet and even a vaginal speculum (Image 4).  As one more element in his tapestry of matter, this juxtaposition reiterates his iconographic parlance where the sacred is in a dyadic relationship to the profane.

Whereas Bernini’s The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, (1652) boasts of a highly polished marble surface, it emanates a lived religious experience.  Teresa of Avila, a nun in the  16th century, is portrayed in revelatory bliss as she gazes upon a vision of Jesus. For Garcia, religious figures appear somber, gently resting entwined in their tableaux.  There is a sense of death masks here, a tribute to loss, punctuated in tone by the all white veneers such as in his Ecstatic Seizures (2015) series, (Image 3).  There is a duality presented here, a conflict of interests, a reverence and a dismissal.  Is religion the ecstasy long for and achieved through practice or is it a cumbersome historical ideology denaturing the flesh?  The desire for transcendence is present but with a skepticism of unseen forces.

William James, in his Varieties of Religious Experience extolls the unseen, the invisible realities, as gestures of being.  And the spiritual in art has been a consistent dialogue with art’s own historical trajectory.  Can an artist reach beyond ordinary experience towards the metaphysical, the otherworldly?

That is a question we can only imagine. Garcia’s works point us in that direction.