Anthony Graham on Christian Garcia-Olivo

Untitled White on Pearlescent Green, 2020, acrylic paint on wood panel, 48 x 48 in.

[Image description: A painting with background that is silvery green at the top and light pink toward the bottom. Positioned in the center is a circle of white woven strands, which sag loosely.]

When looking at Christian Garcia-Olivo’s work, there is a certain kind of fascination in trying to understand what it is that one is really seeing. How did this get made? What is it made of? How long did it take? The meticulous detail of his works— paintings that take on the dimensionality of sculpture— belies the ways in which the artist embraces the spontaneity and accidents inherent in his process of working with materials. Through his own vocabulary of abstract shapes and patterns, Garcia-Olivo’s work references traditions and techniques of craft, while also prompting a reconsideration of assumptions about how we view color, texture, and form. 

Much of Garcia-Olivo’s work appears almost minimalist in its aesthetic. From a distance, his paintings look pristine, ordered, and oftentimes white. But up close, the works’ surfaces are surprisingly dynamic. What at first seems to be a regimented grid is actually a loosely knit weaving, often drooping down or bulging out. Sometimes, the would-be grid is in fact a series of loops that flow across the composition. But in place of thread, Garcia-Olivo uses paint that has been poured into strips and dried as moldable strands. This process is slow and tedious, requiring a certain calm. Each strand is the result of a deliberate and intentional act that is almost meditative. When the strips are then brought together into an overall composition, the grid’s wavering lines convey the artist’s energy and focus, at once in the effort of the single line and the impressive effects of the full work.

Left: Untitled Mustard, 2018, acrylic paint on wood panel, 12 x 12 x 3/4 in. Right: Untitled White and Portrait Weaving, 2019, acrylic paint on paper, 5 x 5 in.

[Image descriptions: Left: A square painting with a mustard-colored background. In the center is a circle of woven white strands, which are tangled in the middle. Right: A woven grid of thick pink and white strands on a white background. The strands— which reach to the edge of the work— bulge off the painting in some places.]

At a smaller scale, these grids remain relatively controlled, such as with Untitled Mustard (2018). Here, the lines are arranged into a circle atop a yellow panel. Within the grid, the white lines pull apart and tangle, without obscuring the overall shape. Working with shorter lengths of painted strips, the interlocking grid can be stretched while maintaining a somewhat rigid form. In Untitled White and Portrait Weaving (2019), the acrylic paint holds its shape, as if the tightly woven surface was either just about to be finished or lightly pulled apart.

The artist’s use of the grid is borne out of an interest in textiles, particularly more domestic forms of weaving such as crochet. By using the grid as a structure that can be pulled apart, stretched, and brought together into new forms, Garcia-Olivo creates a flexibility and fluidity where one might expect rigidity. This surprising approach to his compositions echoes his use of materials, using paint to render sculptural forms rather than applying it directly onto a two-dimensional board. Garcia-Olivo subverts the grid familiar to modernist painting by bringing it into three dimensions—drawing a connection to the techniques used by designers and artisans across time.

Untitled White on Nacreous, 2019, acrylic paint on wood panel, 48 x 48 x 1.5 in.

[Image description: A slightly pearlescent white painting inset with a smaller square of woven white strips, which sag downward.]

Even his use of pearlescent paint is intended to recall mother-of-pearl, a decorative material employed in crafts. In works like Untitled White on Nacreous (2019), Garcia-Olivo’s painted grids produce a clear geometry against these luminous and dimensional backdrops. The physicality and weight of these painted lines as a material becomes even more clear in the larger pieces, where the process more directly embraces the unpredictability of the medium. In Untitled White on Pearlescent Green (2020), a circle is again placed within a regular square panel. Here, the grid is not only larger, but more complex. While certain sections appear to be sculpturally molded, the overall effect is of a loose fabric rolling down the composition.

Untitled Blue Gray, 2020, enamel paint on wood panel, 28 x 18 x 5 in.

[Image description: What looks like a blue-gray piece of fabric draped sculpturally on a white wall. Its surface is slick and reflective.]

In more recent works, Garcia-Olivo has foregone his woven grids to focus more intently on larger swaths of color molded into new shapes. The bright white paints used in several of his grid paintings are frequently punctuated by other colors— such as a mass of pink contained behind one grid or the drop of blue which is hung from another. But while working as an Artist-in-Residence at Bread & Salt in 2020, Garcia-Olivo began pouring single colors of paint into larger “skins.” These have been folded and draped into dimensional works hung on the wall, continuing his effort to produce works teetering between sculpture and painting, while drawing even more attention to his specific choice of color. 

Untitled Olive Skin, 2020, acrylic paint stuffed with polyethylene film, on wood panel, 21 x 20 x 12 in. 

[Image description: What looks like a piece of olive-colored fabric draped sculpturally on a white wall. Its surface is matte.]

The works’ titles are typically informed by the commercial names of the paints themselves. Often, the words that identify these colors appear as unassuming descriptors. The confusion between one color and another might seem innocuous, such as in Untitled Blue Gray (2020), whose title reflects not a particular pigment but a confusion between the color used to produce the work (blue) and the way it is visually received (gray). At other times, these colors connote more intentional meanings. For example, several pieces use a fleshy pink known as “portrait.” Interested in the fine line between formal perception and more meaningful assumptions, Garcia-Olivo selects particular colors to draw out these associations. Through his plain appropriation of their titles, his works sometimes take on their connotations. In Untitled Olive Skin (2020), the reference becomes autobiographical, connecting to the artist’s own last name. In Untitled Night Navy and Melon Sorbet (2020), the title imbues the abstract shapes with a certain playfulness.

Untitled White Skin, 2020, acrylic paint over polyethylene and polyurethane, on wood panel, 48 x 48 x 10 in. 

[Image description: A monochromatic white painting, its upper portion covered in what looks like a piece of white fabric, which comes out sculpturally from the painting’s surface and spreads out onto the wall behind it. 

Much of this explicitly critical attention to color came into focus with the first work of these “skin” paintings: Untitled White Skin (2020). In this work, a square wood panel has been flatly painted white, and what appears like a mound of fabric rests on the upper third of the work, spilling off the board and onto the wall. In many ways the work is a technical feat, having rendered the sculptural element through paint. Its overall sparse appearance conveys a brightness, and achievement of having realized something so clean from a process prone to mistakes. While the work is crafted through a mastery of skill, it also purges all other meaning in favor of an emptiness that is often considered pure. The title then, hints towards a meaning by suggesting that this surface is not only a painting, but a “skin.” Why is it that this skin, seen as a blank yet bright expanse, should be seen as so aspirational? In this way, Garcia-Olivo positions the formal composition of his work with a social valence, through the fraught associations of whiteness and skin. Here, a focus on technical perfection belies a general preoccupation with the ways in which whiteness functions as an impossible standard, a clean slate upon which any mark would blemish its purity. Working against this, Garcia-Olivo subsequently breaks away from the all-white surface, focusing on blacks, browns, and olives. Attending to the complexity of these colors, he draws on their varied associations to provoke new reflections within their rich and varied surfaces. 

Untitled Night Navy and Melon Sorbet, 2020, acrylic paint stuffed with hollow fiber and polyethylene, on wood panel, 60 x 48 x 8 in. 

[Image description: A light wood panel with what look like two pieces of matte fabric resting sculpturally on its surface. The one on the upper left portion of the panel is a peach color, and the one that extends vertically on the right side is a navy blue.]

Garcia-Olivo plays with these aesthetic questions to closely examine the associations of our visual perception. Even without identifiable imagery, his abstractions connect his interest in form and color to broader cultural ideas and social concerns. In the grids, this might be an attention to the intense effort of each individual line— its imperfection a marker of time and energy. In the “skins,” this extends to the ways in which we have been trained to view the world, as color and shape, with specific meanings implicit in what we have presumed to be abstract ideas. Meanwhile, his labor-intensive process transforms the liquid medium into a new solid state. Moving between many different references and influences, from the austerity of minimalism to the handmade quality of craft, Garcia-Olivo uses paint not to depict the world but as a material to translate experience.

Anthony Graham is Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.