DALLAS, TX.- Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden presents Lilian Garcia-Roig: Painted Woods, on view through February 24, 2007. Maximalist landscapes painted on site in Florida , New Hampshire , and Washington comprise Lilian Garcia-Roig’s fifth exhibition since 1994 at Valley House Gallery. A sixteen page catalogue (with an essay by Tatiana Flores, PhD, Assistant Professor at Florida State University ) accompanies the exhibition.

Aesthetically and philosophically, Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Maximalist. She proves that the world can be best understood with a ravenous appetite for more. Garcia-Roig sees more and expresses more.

Taking her studio into the scrubby landscape (with an easel large enough for a 4 by 5 foot painting and crates full of tubes of paint mixed in advance) Garcia-Roig devised a wet-on-wet application in order to paint quickly and intensely all day. In doing so, Garcia-Roig captures different times of the day in one painting (as opposed to the Impressionist goal of capturing one instant of light.) She says,

On site, I feel less confined by conventional rules and feel freer to create a gestural expression of the whole particular scene as I experience it. I focus in and out at various depths, and record the different features that become highlighted as the light changes over time. In this way, I achieve an expanded sense of space and time in my work, and evoke more than is naturally seen at any one time.

Despite the traditional landscape subject matter, Garcia-Roig emphasizes surface over subject. As catalogue essayist Tatiana Flores writes, “devoid of allegory or narrative, her paintings keep attention focused on their painterly surfaces…” Garcia-Roig explains,

By creating the illusion of recognizable trees, I draw the viewers comfortably into an assumption that what they perceive will be glimpses of conventional space. Up close, however, the images break down and the lush, gestural paint marks, the squeezed-out paint patches and the occasional raw canvas help instead, to reinforce the two-dimensional character of abstract painting.

Garcia-Roig has received numerous honors. She earned a Residency at The MacDowell Colony in October 2006 (where the New Hampshire works in this exhibition were painted.) In November 2006, Garcia-Roig learned she would receive a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in painting.

Lilian Garcia-Roig was born in Havana , Cuba , in 1966. She earned her BFA in 1988 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas , and her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. Garcia-Roig was a professor in the Department of Art at the University of Texas in Austin for nine years and she has been the Director of Graduate Studies in Visual Art at Florida State University in Tallahassee since 2002.