Rituals and Liberty, 2026
Digital print on Gesso Flex and oil on pine wood, with elements in American walnut, sipo, and danta wood
170 x 148 x 12.5 cm
This new body of work consists of photographs printed directly onto wood, which is then treated with oil paint and various other media. In these pieces, the artist explores a line of work in which the photographic image establishes a direct dialogue with the painterly medium and with the nature of the city. Through the use of oil paint as a disruptive and narrative element, the project seeks new forms of visual, conceptual, and material expansion. The city, a constant subject of reflection in Garaicoa’s universe, is presented as a space of transformation, traversed by fictions that often defy the logic of the urban and the rational. Painting thus becomes a parallel language that fosters the coexistence of the real and the imagined.
This series consists of various architectural settings into which animals, organic forms, carnivorous plants, and fictional structures burst, inserted into the photograph as visual commentary and creating a surreal quality that we have seen in series such as his thread drawings on photographs; ultimately, these works reflect a creative process in which reality, fiction, and desire have gone hand in hand in a game of substitutions.
This intrusion of the unreal emerges as a critical and poetic gesture that creates tension in the relationship between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the rational, and the real and the fictional.
These works also offer a social and critical critique of the excesses and fractures of the contemporary city—a city plagued by political corruption, wars, and pandemics that can only be addressed through a profound analysis of our lives in relation to nature and our immediate ecosystems.
Photo: Oak-Taylor Smith
