FLASH! DANILO GARCIA

DANILO O. GARCIA took up Fine Arts (major in advertising) initially at the University of Santo Tomas and moved to the newly opened Fine Arts department at the University of the East on his third year. He joined the 1971 Shell art competition and won an award for a painting in mixed media. After he dropped out from the university, he participated in a number of group shows, notably those of Grupo Ocho, an eight-man band of artists from the UE with strong experimental leanings in contemporary art expression. In his third one-man show in 1981 Garcia's paintings had fully shifted to abstraction. Totally abandoning figurative painting, his show at the Luz gallery used acrylic, canvas, masking tape and string to create lines and shapes of controlled tonal variations, graceful rhythms and smooth contrasts.

In ensuing one-man exhibits, Garcia delved into the varying character of the circle, the square, the oval, and the straight and curved lines in different combinations and contexts, in concordant and well-balanced visual and conceptual interactions of moment and space even as they richly alluded to the terrestrial and extra-terrestrial worlds and the meta physical realm. In all of these works, precision and refinement mark Garcia's execution, forms mimicking mechanically produced airbrush art, but were definitely a result of his uncanny skill and talent with the paintbrush. From his brown monochromes of earlier years, his color evolved to the elegance of monochromes while exploring the tonalities of the rainbow spectrum.