Hervé Garcia

b. Nice, France, 1971

Hervé Garcia (b. Nice, France, 1971) is an artist whose work – spanning painting, drawing, artist books and sculpture – draws upon traditions of cartography, Japanese woodblock, color field and impressionist painting. Garcia spent his childhood in Senegal and southern France, where he studied at the École Supérieure d’Art d´Aix-en-Provence. There, he encountered artists associated with the 20th century avant-garde Supports/Surfaces movement. The movement’s radical emphasis on deconstructing traditional approaches to painting – by separating the physical support of the stretcher bar from the painted surface of the canvas – deeply informs Garcia's practice. Garcia works with restored linen, joining and overlapping pieces of the material to create a montage effect. He paints fields of fragmented and undulating forms interrupted by the frayed edges of the fabric, evoking landscapes viewed from an aerial perspective and split by tectonic fractures.

Indeed, landscape is the starting point for his work. Through painting, he explores line, horizontality, the relationships between forms and colors, and how they shape perceptions of space. Reference points include Paul Cézanne’s paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire and Michael Snow’s 1971 film La Région Centrale, which both capture a fragmented quality of light and movement that disrupt our spatial reference points and dissolve the stable horizon altogether. Garcia’s brush strokes expand and recede, creating a rhythm reminiscent of flowing water, a motif that shaped Garcia’s artistic approach during his time at the Kyoto Art Center residency. In his work, water is both element and a figure, a formless subject that alternately assumes a shape and overflows the boundaries of it. His study of maps, Japanese and Chinese landscape painting inform his use of negative space. The human figure, like in Eastern aesthetic traditions, is present but subtle. The artist engages with traces of his own presence, such as the accidental marks or footprints that remain after he works a canvas on the floor, retaining these moments as compositional elements in his paintings. Through these encounters with his material, Garcia meditates on themes of human deference to nature, self-erasure, and a desire to disappear into his surroundings.

Hervé Garcia lives and works in Cologne, Germany, where he paints and makes music.