Hervé Garcia

b. Nice, France, 1971

Hervé Garcia is an artist and musician, whose work – spanning painting, drawing, artist books and sculpture – draws upon traditions of cartography, Japanese woodblock, color field and impressionist painting. 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 fabric, evoking landscapes viewed from an aerial perspective and split by tectonic fractures. His 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.