Flavio Garciandia is recognized as one of the most influential Cuban artists working today and is widely collected by admirers who are attracted to both his color sensibility and abstract compositions. Garciandia is well known for his paintings that quote from the abstract language of Cubism, Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism in what the artist himself has come to ironically term “New Tropical Abstraction”.
The monotypes Garciandia produced during his residency at Aurobora carry a strong residue from his recent paintings, both in the lush marriage of color and compositional forms that migrate along (or settle just beneath) the surface. Garciandia employed the use of cut out stencil shapes as part of his process. He overlaid these forms onto brushed color flats that formed chromatic backdrops of either contrasting or compatible tones. Sometimes the artist would ink an organic shape with vibrant color and then print specific segments to give a composition additional information. At other times, he would use stencils as a masking element, allowing certain areas to remain free from added pictorial elements. By working this way, Garciandia permits earlier efforts to percolate towards the surface while relegating other areas to the background.
The visual tension created in these works on paper modulates from one composition to the next so that the overall suite of monotypes is a harmonious text that both underscores the artist’s continuing aesthetic direction and adds yet another chapter to Flavio Garciandia’s “New Tropical Abstraction”.
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Museo Nacional Palacio de Bellas Artes, Havana, Cuba; Museo Historico, Santa Clara, Cuba; Museum of Modern Art, Lodz, Poland; Museo La Tertulia, Cali, Columbia; Porintaidemuseo, Pori, Finland; Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany; Bank of America, San Francisco, CA; Law Firm of Howard, Rice, Nemerovski, San Francisco, CA; Fairmont Hotel, San Jose, CA; Sharon Heights Country Club, Palo Alto, CA; Pacific Bell Telephone, San Francisco, CA
