I have longed to move away, but it's spring, Matthias Garcia at Gerdman Gallery
Text by Natalia Muntean
Matthias Garcia lives near Versailles and spends a lot of time in its gardens, the excess of flowers and nature’s abundance finding its way into everything he creates. His studio is in his apartment, and he doesn’t keep fixed hours when it comes to his work. Painting, for him, equates with free-flow writing, following stories as they come to his imagination. “I start by creating the background, and while I am doing it, another story is coming,” he says about his process.
The son of a philosophy teacher and a painter, Garcia found his art around seventeen, after years of resistance. He trained at Les Beaux-Arts de Paris and spent a year on exchange in Kyoto, an experience that left a visible mark on his work. The figures in his paintings, often modelled on himself or on his friend, the Réunion-born model Raya Martigny, “painted with a very thin black line, almost tracing back the movement,” are linked directly to Japanese drawing. The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen became his literary compass early on, carried alongside manga and painters like Unica Zürn, Odilon Redon and Hieronymus Bosch, a variety of references that coexist in his canvases.
The paintings in his first Stockholm show, on display at Gerdman Gallery until April 30th, are dense with flowers and detail. Dreamlike and lascivious in the way fairy tales can be, they pull you in to try to decipher their secrets. A nymph drifts underwater, another peels away a mask; in some works, an intense, almost electric blue dominates, the boundaries between reality and fantasy blurring completely.
Andersen’s Little Mermaid runs like a red thread through the work, “she wanted to have a soul, she wanted to become human,” Garcia mentions, alongside The Princess and the Pea, and a self-portrait of sorts: Garcia standing between worlds, protecting what is within. “If you want to have a big imaginary world inside, you have to accept the real world, because if you are in a fight, one of them will destroy the other.”
The title, borrowed from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas and completed by Garcia, is defined by the same duality. Spring arrives regardless. “You want to die,” he said, “and then, oh, it’s spring. I don’t want to die anymore.”
