In his latest exhibition Good Stories to Tell, Mark Andy Garcia turns inward, reflecting upon the lived experiences and quiet reckonings that come with crossing the invisible threshold of forty—that age, long mythologized as the point “where life begins.” For Garcia, it marks neither an end nor a new chapter, but a space of pause, of looking back and forward all at once, with equal parts tenderness and clarity.
Central to the exhibition are two self-portraits—one set against a still life, the other against a landscape—each drawing from the artist’s most familiar and favored genres. These are not simply exercises in formal depiction, but contemplations of identity, temporality, and presence. In both, the artist faces the viewer directly, his gaze unwavering, clear-eyed, devoid of artifice. He does not dramatize his presence. Dressed in a plain shirt, he is simply a man in the world—one who has seen enough, who carries his days with a quiet kind of grace, and who chooses now to speak, softly but surely.
Around these portraits orbit the exhibition’s other works—landscapes, bodies of water, and dreamlike thresholds rendered with Garcia’s signature atmospheric charge. These are psychological spaces, filtered through memory and mood—environments that have been glimpsed, inhabited, or imagined. Some recall places physically visited, while others are fogged by emotion or shaped by dreams. What ties them all together is their liminality: moody, half-lit, and just on the verge of vanishing..
In The Silence That Follows, for instance, the viewer is not merely asked to observe a wooded scene but to inhabit its hush. The stillness is not empty but charged—with afterthought, with echo, with everything unsaid. The trees, shadows, and fading light converge into a moment where narrative and atmosphere collapse into one deep, abiding silence.
Accompanying the paintings is a suite of drawings executed with immediacy and intuition, each line a flash of motion, each composition an urgent act of looking and capturing. These drawings, raw and unfiltered, offer a glimpse into Garcia’s hand as it moves with quickened instinct—unburdened by polish, but rich in sensitivity. They feel like field notes from the interior: sketches not just of the world outside, but of the emotional weather within.
Good Stories to Tell is a meditation on presence and passage, on the act of recording life not just as it is seen, but as it is felt. There is melancholy here, but also gentleness. There is loss, yes—but it is tempered by an understanding that some things remain. That some light stays. That some scenes can still be held. And that, in art as in life, not all is gone. Sometimes, if we are lucky, there are still good stories to tell.
Carlomar Arcangel Daoana
