G.P. 33
Fernando García Ponce
The title of this collage, and the printed text at the center of the composition, allude to the two surnames and birth year of the artist in 1933. This is a placard of expressive modernity, made with a bold-face sans serif font and minimal spacing between characters.
Around this inner signature, García Ponce orchestrates something like a spiral of painted planes that evoke spaces framed, in turn, by other pictorial gestures. These inner paintings, which open like slits and split off into gashes and dry brushstrokes, culminate in the plump drops and red accents that blot the wood at broad intervals. Together, these elements suggest a curious self-portrait—less of the artist as a physical presence than of his craft and the joy that Fernando García Ponce found in what his brother, the writer Juan García Ponce, called “the allure of the void and the artist’s natural tendency to fight it.”
FERNANDO GARCÍA PONCE (1933–1987)
G.P. 33, 1981
Collage and acrylic on wood
Gift of Sara Sierra, 1990
