In 2020, painter, poet, and graffiti artist John Garcia began spray painting trance poems on large-scale urban infrastructure and detritus across Los Angeles. Incorporating visual strategies of forced perspective and spatial distortion, these poems produce a dynamic encounter when approached that foregrounds the psychological tension between intimacy and distance. Garcia’s graffiti practice soon merged with his interest in painting and interior installation, culminating in two sister exhibitions (Tureen, Dallas, TX 2024; Del Vaz Projects, Santa Monica, CA, 2024) in which the artist paired these spatially coded, text-based interventions with figurative paintings and watercolors of the artist’s closest friends. This physical and thematic expansion and contraction in Garcia’s practice evinces a foundational interest in the ways power dynamics, between maker and viewer, friend and lover, state and citizen, unfurl across the most intimate of personal relationships and the vastest of landscapes. Akin to that made by the city’s Light and Space artists beginning in the 1960’s, Garcia’s work endeavors toward a visual expanse of time, place and intention that memorializes the breadth of human relationality.

John Garcia (b.1990, A Coruña, Spain. Lives and works in Los Angeles). Recent solo shows have been held at Tureen (2024); Del Vaz Projects (2024); Carlye Packer (2023); The Material Room (2023). His work has also been included in exhibitions at Baba Yaga Gallery, New York, NY (2023) ; Simian Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022); The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2021); The Still House Group, New York, NY (2015). He also operates the bunker, a project space in the Santa Monica mountain range.