Press Release - Joe Ramiro Garcia More Energy
JOE RAMIRO GARCIA
More Energy
An Online Exhibition
March 12 through April 25, 2025
Contact gallery for pricing, images, viewing and information at:
d@davidrichardgallery.com
David Richard Gallery, LLC
New York, NY
Click here to view the online exhibition
David Richard Gallery is pleased to present, More Energy, by New Mexico-based artist, Joe Ramiro Garcia in his second solo exhibition with the Gallery. This online presentation includes 12 artworks from 2005 to 2023. Eight of the artworks are oil and alkyd on panel, canvas or linen along with four monotype works on paper. The focus in this presentation is on Garcia’s smaller, intimate works ranging in size from 12 x 9 inches up to 24 x 24 inches. These smaller works are every bit as potent and intriguing as the larger paintings and include his well-known imagery and iconography such as bears, cats, monkeys, kitchen appliances, television references and logos from consumer brands. The smaller scaled paintings and monotypes provide a narrower focus, are easier to incorporate into collections, and more price accessible with Retail Prices ranging from $1,900 to $5,500.
It is a challenge to categorize Garcia’s artworks in terms of aesthetics and historical placement as he defies labels. His approach seems effortless, casual collages of memorabilia and ephemera. However, the isolated and ungrounded floating objects, seemingly unrelated vignettes and imagery, illusory effects, mixing non-objective imagery with formalist concerns from art history and combining that content with personal memories and references as well as representational and cultural referents all create a loose and “open” narrative that often seems more like a psychological thriller or episode from the Twilight Zone.
While Garcia’s artwork might seem playful and whimsical at first glance with Teddy Bears, piñatas, dinosaurs, cats, and bright colors, underneath all of that is a seriousness and analysis of our culture, with mass marketing, branding, fashion, changing ideals and values and their ramifications since the 1960s. Thus, the initial impression of Pop-inspired collaging of everyday, somewhat banal, and often appropriated images devolves upon further analysis and pondering to something more surreal and possibly dystopian. Maybe that is not the artist’s intent, but each of his artworks is subject to varying interpretations influenced by current news cycles and whatever is trending at the moment. The artist is fine with this fluidity, external influences, and leaving interpretation to the viewers.
Not only are Garcia’s paintings visually engaging and conceptually perplexing as noted above, but they are also highly technical. Garcia is a painter’s painter and artist’s artist. He loves the oil medium. Early on in his studio practice, he wanted to layer his paintings with imagery and content along the lines of “Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Sigmar Polke, Philip Taaffe, and Nancy Spero”, according to Garcia, but he did not want to collage, silkscreen, nor monotype the images as his predecessors had. Instead, Garcia developed a process that utilizes gum Arabic and hand pressing the imagery onto the oil paint surfaces. The medium for the image transfer with his process is paint, not ink, so that every layer and detail in his compositions on canvas and panel is oil medium. His process not only provides layers of color and detail, but also content as a referent and/or memory trigger.
Garcia’s paintings are narrative, derived from current events and inspired by art historical figures, while the imagery and palettes reference personal memories and emotions from his childhood growing up in Houston including those of certain rooms, popular colors, and kitchen appliances in the family home as well as his exposure to cartoon characters, television shows, household products and brands—all the contemporary culture surrounding the artist at that time. Other characters such as Louie the cat, stuffed teddy bears, furniture, paint brushes and coffee cups are the artist’s possessions. Much of the referenced artworks, news clippings and photographs incorporated in the paintings are from art books, newspapers, memorabilia and ephemera.
The layering of pigment in Garcia’s paintings not only makes them tactile, but the appearance of clippings and ephemera folded and haphazardly taped to the surface, casual doodles and objects scattered about alongside the nearly photoreal imagery brings a literalness and immediacy to the work that starkly contrasts with the cartooning, retro colors, and historic images. Garcia’s hands-on and less than perfect approach to painting is the norm, while the move to greater use of realism is relatively recent. This mashup of binaries: cartoons and hyperreality; contemporary and retro culture; today’s news and historical references; the artist’s memories as signifiers, and the viewer’s reactions all create an internal tension that make the compositions engaging and energetic. Ultimately, the viewer’s own memory and experiences are what create the narrative. The titles can be leading, but the array of images, references and colors are really decoded and reconstructed by the viewer. Garcia just lures the viewer with eye-grabbing colors, surreal compositions, bold contrasts and a lot of ambiguity.
About Joe Ramiro Garcia:
Joe Garcia was born in Houston, Texas and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His artworks have been exhibited in numerous museum and gallery exhibitions, including 16 solo exhibitions across the US and one in Havana, Cuba. He has been the recipient of a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, New York; a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Honorable Merit of the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts, Washington, D.C. His exhibitions and artworks have been reviewed and feature in numerous local and national publications and in numerous private collections. Garcia lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
About David Richard Gallery:
In 2015 David Richard Gallery launched DR Art Projects to provide a platform for artists of all stripes—international, national, local, emerging and established—to present special solo projects or to participate in unique collaborations or thematic exhibitions. The goal is to offer a fresh look at contemporary art practice from a broad spectrum of artists and presentations. The Gallery opened its current location in New York in 2017.
Since its inception in 2010, David Richard Gallery has produced museum quality exhibitions that feature Post War abstraction in the US. The presentations have addressed specific decades and geographies as well as certain movements and tendencies. While the gallery has long been recognized as an important proponent of post-1960s abstraction—including both the influential pioneers as well as a younger generation of practitioners in this field—in keeping with this spirit of nurture and development the gallery also presents established artists who embrace more gestural and representational approaches to the making of art as well as young emerging artists.
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