PAUL GARCIA GOES BIG

Paul Garcia with BIG, as received.
Movie poster. 27”x40”

Paul Garcia paints faces coming apart. A cheek peels back and there is the skull. A head splits and out come smiley faces, rainbows and monarch wings. It is bright, clean and a little unsettling.

So of course the poster he picked is one giant face. BIG. 1988. Tom Hanks grinning under one line of copy: “Have you ever had a really big secret?”

He works on anything that holds still. Box trucks. Roll-down gates. A gas station wall. He calls it his outdoor work. He signs all of it the same way: a P, a triangle, an upside-down triangle, an L.

And for a living, he designs movie posters. He is in the thick of the industry right now. That makes him one of the few people in this show who has stood on both sides of the surface. He knows what it takes to make a poster, and he knows what it means to paint over one.

One more irony. Everything else in Spray LA is lobby banners and bus shelters. BIG is just a poster, poster size. It is currently the smallest piece in the show.

More of Paul’s work at paulgarcia.art.