'Paintings and Drawings by Anthony W. Garza'
This new exhibit of Garza's work with color constitutes a win-win-win
Reviewed by Wayne Alan Brenner, Fri., Sept. 21, 2012
'Paintings and Drawings by Anthony W. Garza'
Tiny Park Gallery, 1101 Navasotawww.tinyparkgallery.com
Through Oct. 6
Anthony W. Garza has new works – a solo show – up at Tiny Park Gallery right now, and that's a damn good thing. In fact, it's one of those win-win-win situations. Yes, that's three wins.
It's a win for Tiny Park, because this is only the second show in its new space, and to have such wonders as Garza can create adorning its walls, well, that's what they call A Big Plus in the ledger of awesomeness. Last couple of shows we saw of Garza's elsewhere, we were impressed by his facility with pencils. "It's monochrome magnificence," we said. "None of these [natural-world] pieces are committed with cartoony cuteness or the three-wolf-moon sense of irony too often seen tainting such images. These are hyperrealistic, high-contrast drawings referencing nothing but the objects themselves, thoroughly devoid of context, surrounded by enough white space to frame the images at a remove akin to the distance between, say, us and the dinosaurs." But this show at Tiny Park also includes new full-color paintings of the same precise realism, in which the natural world has been mashed up with bits of modern human fabrication. Is that a bighorn sheep, or is that a lovely townhouse with the, ah, Mars rover embedded within? Oh, hey, yes: all of those things together.
And it's a win for Garza, because after little more than a year, Tiny Park's become known for showing some of the best visual work around, and so more people are likely to stop in and see what's up in their new space over by Hillside Farmacy, regardless of the particular show. And the visitors will see, among the other works, an iceberg rendered perfectly in nothing but layered graphite on huge archival paper, and they'll form an equation in their minds: Garza = wow.
And it's a win for you, Austinite, because you can be among those visitors; you can brighten a weekend afternoon – the gallery's open from noon to 5pm on Saturdays – by seeing those Garza-made beauties on the Tiny Park walls. And you could do this before or after having dined at the aforementioned Farmacy or Blue Dahlia or any of the other excellent eateries right nearby. Which might actually make a total of four wins? And we figure that, especially in these uncertain times, even just one win a day is a damn good thing indeed.