Equity Gallery Rebound Series
Pablo Garcia Lopez, “Cosmic Pieta”, 2019, Natural silk, PLA filament and fabric, 48x12x8 inches
The Silky Splendor of Pablo Garcia Lopez
By Charlotte Kent
Rebounding
As a participant in Spring/Break Art Show, one of New York’s Armory week art fairs, Equity Gallery recently reimagined baroque splendor on the brink of spoilage for a well-received group exhibit titled Fragments of Luxury. The show presented the twisted morass of our cultural excess across photography, painting, and sculpture. The artists highlighted positions and representations of historic, cultural power while also showing something failing, falling. Taking Oscar Wilde’s famed quip, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess” as a pivot, the exhibit assembled art works dedicated to examining a luxury careening towards collapse.
Given the precarity of our current moment, Equity Gallery returns to this exhibit with a focus on Pablo Garcia Lopez’ finely wrought silk works that engage the history of art and science, secularity and spirituality, weaving brain morphology with sculptural iconology. His neuroanatomical structures are resonant with cathedral bas relief ornamentation. The densely woven, monochromatic multi-figure pieces lace baroque influences with neural networks, a nod to his Spanish homeland and his intellectual background as a neuroscientist.
Pablo Garcia Lopez, “Small Bas Relief, I,” 2019 Natural silk fibers, shadow box, plexiglass covered, 16x11x 2 inches
Pablo Garcia Lopez ups the Catholic Baroque quotient with cryptic emblems and angels swinging bare-assed on tassels. The architectural reliefs alternately recall details from Tintoretto’s Paradiso and Dante’s ninth circle of hell, crammed into a Joseph Cornell shadow box. His works range from small to large, towering to break through their domes, spinning from ceilings, cast, spun, hung. This variety reflects modes in which he produces, sometimes an excess of exuberance drives him through the night, while at other times a meditative peace transports the process. His constructions offer a vision capable of sending Saint Teresa over the edge into an ecstatic swoon.
Pablo Garcia Lope, “Ecstatic Seizure”, 2019, Natural silk, PLA filament (3D printing) and fabric, 48x29x7 inches
The nervous system is baroque, full of detail and three dimensional.
You can go in depth.
It is like being in a fantasy world.”
Pablo Garcia Lopez
In the large box work, “Ecstatic Seizure,” Garcia Lopez reflects on the agonies of St. Teresa to propose a new reading of this famed Catholic figure. He twists Bernini’s famous sculpture of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa to introduce figurations of the brain stem, corpus callosum, and elastic neurons, pointing to the possibility that her visions were auras, her raptures the torments of epilepsy, alternately understood in a different time. Her head floats above her body, mind and flesh divided but reunited in neurological speculations of a catholic order. The cast fiber alludes to marble but the spun silk softens the rawness of the depiction.
Pablo Garcia Lopez, “Small Bas Relief, II” Natural silk fibers, shadow box, plexiglass covered, 16x11x 2 inches, 2019
The thread gleams in the light. Silk worms once marshalled for royal garments are now adopted by labs for genetic engineering. In this artist’s hands, however, a spool of silk creates stimulating visions uniting past, present, and future. The baroque was a period daunted by crisis with art exploding and exploring new ways of seeing and thinking, channeled as an emblem of an established order even as it broadened perspectives. What’s old is new again; our past is present as we seem to be in a future, boxed in screens, communicating in fragments. Garcia Lopez works explore the varieties of experience, the invisible microscopic order of the mind that disrupts our perceived stability, the history that infuses the stories we produce today and tomorrow.
“Fragments of Luxury” Spring/Break Art Show 2020 installation view
ARTIST BIO:
Pablo Garcia Lopez was born in Madrid in 1977. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Biochemistry from Autonoma University, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Complutense University, both located in Madrid, Spain. As a Neuroscientist, he published numerous scientific papers in international journals. In 2008, he moved to New York when he obtained a grant from the Caixa Galicia Foundation to develop the “Cortical Garden” at the School of Visual Arts. Later, he received a fellowship from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, where he graduated in 2012 (MFA, Sculpture). Garcia Lopez has been an artist in residence at Brooklyn Art Space, Franconia Sculpture Park and Bronx Art Museum. He has participated in exhibitions in Spain, Germany, Czech Republic, England, United States and Australia. His work is present in many private and public collections around the world.
To see more of Pablo Garcia Lopez’ artwork, visit our Members Gallery!