“EN PLEIN” SIGHT: Paintings by Lilian Garcia-Roig

Monday, December 19, 2011  • Exhibitions, Previous Exhibitions

September 17 – December 10, 2011
Dorothy Jenkins Gallery

Lilian Garcia-Roig is a native Cuban and currently a professor of art at Florida State University.  Although her work is rooted in historical convention, she transcends the typical definition of a landscape painter.  Her large-scale, surface leavened works pivot between the recognizable and the abstract.  Her intent is to reconcile these two opposing styles by picking up where Vincent van Gogh left off: painting outdoors (or en plein air) with thick thrashes of paint to produce lavish landscapes.  Yet, Garcia-Roig invents a tangent by allowing the landscape to dissolve into an arrangement of abstract forms; as you approach her paintings, they begin to appear less like natural landscapes and more like arrangements of abstract forms.  Her chosen painting style only contributes to this oscillation between realism and abstraction, combining brushwork with thick globs of color forced directly onto the canvas from the paint tubes.  These paintings arrive at being unconventional by way of progressing what was once conventional.