What It Means to Bend:
Astrid Garcia’s Compositions of Longing
“The claustrophobic figures oscillate in between the need to settle into and accept the discomfort of the flesh and the yearning to escape the confines of corporeality. ”
Left: Surrender the Faithful Animal You Once Called Your Body, 2023.
Right: Lamentations, 2023.
“It’s not necessarily a performance in a way that we typically think about it, but it’s focused around that person’s freedom and being seen… almost trying to refract what you think you’re seeing.”
The binary has long ago been established: either you’re a woman with curves, or one without.
The difference is everything— sticks vs melons, hips vs thigh gap. With this categorical assessment, an entire personality is assigned.
When I walked into the B.Y.B gallery— through the typical path of a tiny gallery, far flung above some winding maze in Chinatown and up a crooked, narrow flight of stairs — I didn’t know that in each painting in the Compositions of Longing series, Astrid Garcia was painting herself.
It was early December, after Art Basel in Miami and before most people carried Christmas trees across the streets and into their apartments. It was raining, I was wearing a jacket; in winter, the most awareness I give my body is in terms of cold or fine.
Entering the 200 sqft room, I saw it was divided in half, the whole series contained on two opposite walls. Three paintings hang across one another on either side, roughly the size of doors. On the wall between them, one image stands apart: a silk panel, delicate and in shades of brown.
I had heard of Garcia through a local Brooklyn poetry circuit; it made sense, then, how poetically I was forced to dismember and rearrange what I saw to make sense of it. Bodies, fleshy and twisted, looked like mine— the slope of a calf, a rounded back. A loose arm pulled around the canvas like taffy. The unifying palette was peach, pink, red, and an occasional slice of a rich, jarring green.
“Do you like it?” my friend asked.
He was studying a face in Don’t Try to Keep It, Remember It was a Loan. In it, a blue woman appears to be looking over her shoulder.
“She looks haunted,” he remarked.
“She looks tired,” I said.
We took a few steps back. And found ourselves doing so repeatedly.
It may have been because the faces are the easiest focal points to latch onto. In Surrender the Faithful Animal You Once Called Your Body, a figure is curled in the bottom corner, and then in an overlapping sequence, she seems to be, frame by frame— uncoiling. Her face is in profile, and another face drifts — separately, like an upturned leaf — on the far left. In Lamentations, one face is pinned to the top while a pair of feet are anchored to the bottom. Everything in the middle is a mess, swimming with body parts.
We keep playing this game, locating the faces as though they could offer clues into Garcia’s cryptic titles. Communion: the pyramid composition of a bare-breasted woman outstretched below, a looming face at the top, limbs framing the canvas. In The Eye of a Storm is a Quiet Place, I spy four faces, lined against a body in plow pose. In Arch of Hysteria, a body similarly upside-down reveals just one face, but it is about the same size of a swollen hand, an engorged foot.
And it isn’t the faces that are compelling. It isn’t even the bodies. I didn’t return to the expression that my companion was so moved by. What I loved about Compositions of Longing was not the concentrated moments of clarity, but the lush chaos that surrounded them.
Wandering around the small space in just a few steps, I realized I was drawn most toward the overwhelming bloom of the bodies, because they forced me to reckon with my own.
The word I may be looking for is sensual — the softness where color folds into shape, slips into a more recognizable form. Distorting and rewriting a body allows a viewer to not only notice its inherent strangeness, but also appreciate its pliability, its movement and endless give. When was the last time I had moved that way — could I?
In a circle, a curve — the exact moment a line changes course is harder to pinpoint. I don’t think, in any one of the paintings, there is a single tight knot of a corner. There are no dramatic points of a straight line meeting a straight line to signal turn. It is all twist. No elbow, no muscle, ever sharpens into an angle. It is all movement, bending endlessly on.
“She paints herself in the mirror,” the curator at the desk tells me, when I ask.
Before I knew about this cross-examination García was doing, I’d been feeling my way through her compositional sense of flow — the unpredictability and unstoppableness of bodies crashing. But knowing that it was about her relationship to her own body gave the claustrophobia new meaning: what does it mean to look at yourself, and then distort it — over and over? What is it that you are trying to see?
It isn’t until I leave the exhibit that I read Garcia’s official statement.
The human form is an axis to explore the tensions inherent to our desires and anxieties…returning again and again to unresolved emotions that linger in the body.
Was it inevitable that the man I was with saw a woman afraid, and I saw one that was tired? How different to see yourself not looking at someone else, but your own reflection. And where do you focus on then? On the face? On the twisted ankle, on a flat, firm palm? Out of all that chaos, how exactly does one narrow in on themselves?
Compositions of Longing is a product of grief, after the death of Garcia’s family members. The series is also inspired by Charcot’s Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. A hysterical arch, I read, here formally indicates a loss of self control and self-possession…both ecstatic rapture and psychotic disorder.
I thought of this as I took a step back and looked again.
It was difficult for me to read beyond the peachy softness of the color, the ribboning insides of flesh. I did not see grief, I saw desire and fatigue, the give and strain of my own body. And this forced me to think of how little time I spend there, now, with so much more of my attention on my mind than in the muscles holding all the heaviness. I am less present in my body, in the rapture and disorder, particularly this season.
There are so few spaces of breath in the series, of empty space not layered by body on body. But there is an alternate view of this, too: what if instead we considered that chaos to be all breath, a flowing similar to the cycles and tumbles of the figures enacting it. What a bold attempt then, to try to capture the weight and pulse of holding a posture. Such a self-portrait feels, in the end, natural.
As we close out the year, I want to be tender to my body, that faithful animal that runs and crawls, contorts and contorts, bends but does not break. All the curves flattened by coats, weighed down by the multitude of wars and smaller-scale politics playing out in our holiday homes. And I think of my own witnesses, the mess that others see, the parts they locate and narrow in on in an attempt to make sense of me. How tender this series is, a portraiture that offers a kind of relief: it’s all here, it’s all lush, it’s all mine.
Compositions of Longing will be on view 30 Nov 2023 through 31 Dec. 2023. Thursday, December 28th, there will be a closing reception featuring an accompanying poetry reading. This event marks the final show of B.Y.B Studios in its current space before moving locations in 2024.