Gonzalo Garcia: Interlace curated by Charles Moore
Kates-Ferri Projects, NYC
April 1 – May 10, 2025
Images courtesy of the artist and Kates-Ferri Projects.
Gonzalo Garcia is an artist based in Mexico City whose work is rooted in shaping identity, memories, and cultural exchange. Gonzalo has a broad range of influences from cinema and literature, as well as his memories and experiences from childhood. The visual language in his paintings blends historical and cultural influences while inviting the audience to reflect on their relationships to power, identity, and vulnerability. Gonzalo created new paintings for his solo exhibition, Interlace, at Kates-Ferri Projects, curated by Charles Moore. Characterized by a fluid yet charged atmosphere, they blend dream-like compositions with scenes of violence and eroticism.
One of the influences throughout Garcia’s childhood while growing up in Mexico City was film and TV. In this exhibition, Gonzalo showcases a new series of works inspired by a 1970s Mexican film called Los Cachorros (The Puppies), a film about a boy who was violently attacked and castrated by a dog. Gonzalo remembers this movie from childhood and how the psychological implications of a traumatic event like that on screen stuck with him. Films from Mexico in the 1970s reflected a politically tumultuous time for the country when there was a lot of violence, political corruption, and protests. By connecting this part of cinematic history to his artwork, Gonzalo reflects on the pervasiveness of violence in society today, inspiring empathy and understanding.
The paintings blend figuration and abstraction while taking a surreal approach to depicting the violence of the dog attacks, while incorporating medieval iconography. The compositions are simple yet detailed, with varying paint strokes, textures, and techniques. The human bodies look soft and are often partially covered, and by contrast, the dogs are very detailed and precise. The figures and dogs mesh together in some works, creating dream-like sequences. In the piece, Pitched battle I (hands that drag), a blend of different colors, body parts, and shapes creates a fast-moving abstract composition. The brush strokes are faster, and only some aspects of the figures are easy to make out, like hands and feet. The piece is less representational, but Gonzalo still evokes a feeling of chaos and vulnerability.
In other paintings, the representation of a dog attack is more visceral, like in ‘The dance of the suave III.’ Still using varied techniques and fluid composition, the dogs are biting the limbs of a human figure. There is a distinct separation between animal and human, with the dogs circling the figure, biting and pulling all limbs, and almost stretching the figure across the canvas as the body appears bare and helpless in this ever-constant loop. Gonzalo’s color palette primarily consists of blues, light purples, muted yellows, and browns. The colors starkly contrast with the subject matter and create a softness within the depictions of chaos and violence. For Gonzalo, color is a way to evoke a unique visual experience and create new aesthetic realities. Even within this limited palette, he takes the paint and creates variations through different techniques and applications, thus adding more dimensions to the visual composition.
The influence of drawing is evident as well. Throughout the works, Gonzalo left parts of the drawings underneath the painting visible, adding to this loose and soft nature often associated with sketches or drawings in the paintings. In other paintings, the figure is partially or fully covered, the body going out of the picture frame or masked by objects, and only the limbs the dogs are attacking are revealed. When the face is visible in the paintings, it is inanimate, without revealing too many details like eye color and nose. The lack of facial features increases awareness of the actions happening on or around the body. By excluding parts of the figures and leaving out the details in the face or only showing the limbs, it represents how the human body is constantly manipulated and controlled. The contrast in the painting styles represents the duality between power and freedom, the disturbing and the pleasant.
