The Ballrooms of Mars. Camille Rose Garcia Solo Show

Camille Rose Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California. She produces paintings, prints and sculptures in a gothic, “horror” cartoonish style, which release a sense of adorability and implicit creepiness.
 
Garcia’s stunningly subversive images define her signature style based on elaborate socio-political narratives that the artist hides beneath layers and nuances of fairytale charm, which subtly criticise the failures of the capitalist utopias celebrated by American countercultures.
 
William Burroughs’s cut-up writings and surrealist movies, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons influence Garcia’s layered, fragmented descriptive scenes. The surfaces of her paintings are worn-out, as if layers have been repeatedly painted over, alluding to medieval motifs or to 1950s movies. As a result, her figures become remote cousins of classic fairy-tales and early-twenty century cartoons, inhabiting the bed lands of the artist’s twisted mind.
 
The same happens with the artist’s spirited animals and obscure princesses lost in the splattered scene, which is a blend of nostalgic pop culture references with a satirical view of modern society. Garcia’s works grotesque yet persuasively beautiful, explore obscurity and reflect the artist’s childhood memories, which seem to be warm and misty, on the one side, fictional mirrors of the counterculture of Los Angeles that was somewhat ominous and violent, on the other side. As she said during an interview, “things that make me mad motivate me”.
 
In her solo show at Dorothy Circus Gallery, Camille Rose Garcia will propose a brand-new collection of unique pieces that not only refer to her influences and primordial inspirations, but also hold contemporaneity in high regard. By mixing colours with lines and stark contrasts, the artist invites the public to enter a new territory and to walk the path that leads through imagination, beauty, critique of the everyday and the vibration of music that accompanies us everyday through emotions and feelings.

The Ballrooms of Mars explores, in particular, the outer space dimension. We are lead in a journey through distant and magical dimension, in which we encounter mysterious creatures and Ziggy Stardust-like characters – born from Camille Rose Garcia’s imagination but also undoubtedly influenced by popular heroes like David Bowie. Music echoes in all Garcia’s artworks, in which the figures hold and virtually play LPs and record players, remarking a suggestive musical iconography that inhabits the paintings.
 
The cosmic energy that flows within music and within human souls creates an emotional bond that can be evinced by the palette used and the captivating atmosphere of the environments depicted. In this continuous movement of energies, our inner beings awake to participate in a universal dance of sensuous and emotional impulses. L.A.’s musical counterculture, too, becomes evident through the rock and roll sounds of these images – sounds that are also constantly present through the artist’s creative process.
 
In Garcia’s ballroom we dance to futuristic tunes, we jump from planet to planet, exploring like the Little Prince the secrets and wonders of each place of the journey. While stardust flows in the atmosphere, Garcia’s works enchant the viewers and challenge their imagination to find, eventually, those hidden worlds that dwell within their subconscious.
 
Garcia’s work has been displayed internationally in galleries and museums and featured in numerous magazines including Juxtapoz, Rolling Stone, and Modern Painter. Her artworks have been exposed in the Los Angeles County Museum and in San Jose Museum of Art’s, which held Garcia’s retrospective “Tragic Kingdom”. c
 
Among her great exhibitions there are also her participation in “Art from the New World” at the Bristol City Museum, “Pop Surrealism”, held at the Museum of Visual Arts Palazzo Collicola in Spoleto, Italy, “Turn the Page” at The Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) and “Cross The Streets” held at MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Italy in 2017.

Preview: Saturday February 25th 2018 || 5 - 8.30 pm

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