Jorge Garcia Almodovar's 'Looped Symmetry' at Review Studios
By ALICE THORSON
The Kansas City Star, February 10, 2008



Minimalism, an art of hard-edged geometric forms fabricated from industrial materials,
asserts a strong presence at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where the modern and
contemporary art collection includes stellar works by Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl
Andre and others.

Artists, especially, have benefited from having works by these masters at hand. Certainly
their influence is apparent in the work of Kansas City artist Jorge Garcia Almodovar, a 2008
Charlotte Street Foundation award winner. His new show at Review Studios Exhibition Space
offers a 21st-century update of classic 1960s minimalism.

The six wall pieces and single sculpture he presents in his exhibit, "Looped Symmetry,"
maintain the austere geometries of his minimalist predecessors but seek to increase
viewer interaction.

Garcia accomplishes this largely through his choice of materials, including new reflective
plastics and mirrored glass, which play with the viewer's perception. An elegant three-part
wall piece - comprising three white horizontal "boxes" striped with sparkly metallic bands of
color-shifting vinyl - encourages viewers to move about and experience the changing colors.

Garcia became interested in minimalism after encountering the pared-down public artworks of
Kansas City artist James Woodfill. "That rawness really sparked something in me," he said.
"I started thinking about materials and letting the materials drive the direction, instead
of forcing a literary or illustrative concept."

Born in New Jersey to Puerto Rican parents who moved back to the island when he was 8,
Garcia said he "drew a lot" when he was growing up but was not exposed to art other than
folk traditions. After returning to New Jersey for high school, he studied illustration at
the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he lived until moving to Kansas City in 2002.

There is an op-art dimension to many of the works in this show, including two wood panel
paintings, one painted gray, one painted white, displaying routed designs that look like
mazes inspired by paper clips or hair pins. The eye gets lost trying to trace the continuity
of these rising and dipping parallel lines, which loop at the top and bottom and sometime
break in the middle. The perceptual challenge is most acute in a silver-vinyl cutout
version of the design, pressed directly on the wall. This is the exhibit's most riveting
work, and Garcia is offering it in a limited edition of 11.

The main allure of this show stems from its rhythms, which impart a sense of motion to
Garcia's pristine symmetrical arrangements of geometric forms. The movement is not all
one way but rather back and forth, in line with the artist's use of the palindrome as
an organizing concept. An arrangement of 10 wood bars, eight in a row and two positioned
above them - Garcia compares them to white piano keys with colored sides - plays out the
idea in the ordering of the colors, which read the same from right to left.

The most experimental piece includes a sound component and flashing lights. Garcia etched
a geometric design on a sheet of black mirrored glass that forms the "lid" of a shallow,
wall-mounted box containing flickering LED lights. The lights are activated, he said,
through an electronic color organ, which translates sound into light. The sound here is
a musical piece composed by the Kansas City group Monta at Odds specifically for Garcia.
Woodfill assisted him with the technology.

This feels like a first step toward something that could be developed on a larger and,
perhaps, public scale. In recent years Garcia has made several forays into public art,
including a piece in the 2006 Avenue of the Arts and a recent temporary sculpture,
"Harmonium," for the Lee's Summit public art program.

Garcia has included "Harmonium," a structure of stacked, segmented curving sheets of
plastic and aluminum supports, in his Review exhibit, where it serves as a signpost of
his continuing interest in music as an artistic touchstone."The way my work comes about
is more like a musical composition," he said. " I really go with what I feel would be the
next step. I compare it to notes on a musical score."