The “Phantasmacabre” world of Camille Rose Garcia at Corey Helford Gallery

Los Angeles artist and pop surrealist Camille Rose Garcia will be presenting her latest series of gothic-psychedelic paintings in a new exhibition titled Phantasmacabre at Corey Helford Gallery. Phantasmacabre will be her first solo show in Los Angeles since 2011 and début the biggest paintings of her career.

Phantasmacabre is influenced by the surrealist and deeply symbolic films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jungian archetypes, and fairy tales that give shape to a rich and multi-layered symbolic world that explores the realm of memories and dreams.

Of her new work Garcia says: “I’m trying to capture an emotional and psychological landscape where dreams and memory combine to form a personal symbolic language, both unique and universal. I’m interested in the feeling of something beautiful and frightening existing at the same time. Something painful and pleasurable all at once.” The world described by Garcia give us a glimpse into an acid-colored fever-dream scenes inhabited by witches and ghosts, skulls, insects and snakes in gardens filled with intertwining branches and plants growing from their wounds, portraying a psychedelic dance between life and death.

According to Camille Rose Garcia most of her work had been “about the painful intersection of nature and culture, the rampant destructive nature of the modern world. At times I feel a certain helplessness about the state of the world, and I retreat into beauty, into color, into music. This is the language of the universe, in all of its repeating patterns. This series of paintings is the most personal, but also universal. It is no longer about culture, but of trying to tap into a deeper symbolic language beyond words.”

Garcia was born in 1970 in Los Angeles, California as the child of a Mexican activist filmmaker father and a muralist/painter mother. Being influenced by the work of William Burroughs’ cut-up writings and surrealist film, as well as vintage Disney and Fleischer cartoons, her work acts as critical commentaries on the failures of capitalist utopias, blending nostalgic pop culture references with a satirical slant on modern society.

Phantasmacabre opens on Saturday, July 16th and will run through August 20, 2016 at the gallery located on 571 S. Anderson St. (Enter on Willow St), Los Angeles, CA 90033, USA.