Phantasmacabre

Solo Exhibition

Corey Helford Gallery - Los Angeles, CA

July 16 - August 19, 2016

On Saturday, July 16th, Corey Helford Gallery will proudly unveil new works from internationally recognized Los Angeles artist and pop surrealist pioneer Camille Rose Garcia. Garcia’s newest series of gothic-psychedelic nature paintings, titled “Phantasmacabre,” will be her first solo show in Los Angeles since 2011and debut the biggest paintings of her career. In addition, this will be Garcia’s first show withCHG.

Influenced by the surrealist and deeply symbolic films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jungian archetypes, and fairy tales, “Phantasmacabre” depicts a lush and layered symbolic world that explores the realm of memories and dreams.

Mother nature dominates, with fecund, tangly gardens overtaking painful subconscious memes. Candy colors, repeating patterns, and psychedelic symmetry form an underlying organic structure for the paintings. Figurative fragments from children’s books and fairy tales form a deeply personal narrative dominated by various feminine archetypes and villains. The beautiful and the macabre negotiate a delicate balance of creation and destruction. 

Of her new work, Garcia says: “I’m trying to capture an emotional and psychological landscape where dreams and memory combine to form a personal symbolic language, both unique and universal. I’m interested in the feeling of something beautiful and frightening existing at the same time.  Something painful and pleasurable all at once.”

Ghosts and witches, snakes and skulls frame acid-colored fever-dream scenes of wounded goddesses slayed open, fecund gardens growing from their wounds. Vibrant strange gardens populated with insects and dream imagery portray a psychedelic dance between life and death.

She adds, “Most of my work had been about the painful intersection of nature and culture, the rampant destructive nature of the modern world. At times I feel a certain helplessness about the state of the world, and I retreat into beauty, into color, into music. This is the language of the universe, in all of its repeating patterns. This series of paintings is the most personal, but also universal. It is no longer about culture, but of trying to tap into a deeper symbolic language beyond words.”

OPENING NIGHT