Primos by Robert Garcia

Hi collectors, it's Sara this morning. A couple months ago, we introduced our first edition from Robert Garcia. Today, we're following up with its sibling print: Primos.

Like We Are Who We Are, writing and thinking about Primos surfaces sweet nostalgia—for seemingly endless days spent running around outside, in various stages of costume, dress or undress, whatever the game of the moment called for. And also, slightly unsettling muddles—where were we? Why did we think that? What exactly were we doing? Like my own memories, the details in Robert's paintings are limited but specific. Colors, items of clothing and individuals are rendered but the environment in which the events of the day took place, as well as whatever is about to happen, or has happened, is unclear.

What we choose to remember and what we choose to forget are both augmented and disputed by who was there with us—cousins, siblings, friends. Robert's works are alternately bright and sharp and dull and soft, fusing both the present and the past—the people documented the most precisely. The rest of the information falls off at the periphery, following the same panoramic sweep of the eyelids. The invented and imagined, the real and fabricated, the stuff that becomes myths and legends is documented and somehow remembered, retold and shared.

Like Bert Teunissen's quest to record the light of his childhood home and preserve, on film, the architecture of pre-WWII Europe and Clare Grill's recognition that what was can never be again, and her paintings of what was in spite of that, this looking back might be what keeps us moving forward.