Mike Garibay creates expressive abstract works defined by spontaneous forms, vivid color relationships, and an intuitive sense of movement. Working primarily with oil paint and oil pastels, he builds compositions across large canvases as well as more intimate pieces on canvas and panels. His shapes may appear random at first, yet their placement reveals an underlying structure that gives each work balance and visual momentum.
Garibay’s practice moves comfortably between abstraction and representation. Alongside his energetic abstract compositions, he produces finely detailed portraits that demonstrate a more controlled and observational side of his artistry. He also develops mural-scale projects, allowing his distinctive language of color and form to transform larger architectural spaces. Across these different formats, Garibay approaches art as an emotional process. Rather than illustrating a fixed story, he allows materials, gestures, and shifting forms to guide each work toward its own identity.
An Unplanned Yet Controlled Visual Rhythm
In this oil pastel work on cardboard, Mike Garibay presents an intricate accumulation of emotions through overlapping colors, irregular shapes, and flowing lines. The composition does not follow an obvious narrative or depict a clearly identifiable scene. Instead, it creates an atmosphere shaped by movement, contrast, and visual association. Each form appears to lead into another, producing a continuous rhythm that encourages the viewer’s attention to travel across the entire surface.
The work is dominated by warm reds, oranges, and yellows, balanced by areas of turquoise, blue, green, cream, and black. These colors do more than divide the composition into separate sections. They establish emotional shifts. The intense red forms introduce energy and urgency, while the softer cream and muted beige areas offer moments of calm. Turquoise and blue bring a cooler sensation into the work, creating contrast without disturbing its overall unity.
Garibay describes his approach as random, but the composition suggests a productive tension between spontaneity and control. The forms are unpredictable, yet they do not feel carelessly arranged. Large rounded areas are positioned beside narrow vertical shapes, while curved edges are interrupted by dark lines and geometric fragments. The result resembles the changing rhythm of human experience: events emerge unexpectedly, emotions overlap, and moments that initially seem unrelated gradually become part of a larger pattern.
Cardboard plays an important role in the character of the work. Unlike a perfectly smooth surface, paperboard possesses a visible texture that interacts naturally with oil pastel. The medium can be layered, softened, blended, or pressed into the material, allowing color to appear dense in some areas and translucent in others. Subtle marks remain visible beneath the broader color fields, giving the composition a physical quality and revealing traces of the artist’s hand.
Black outlines provide another unifying element. Some lines firmly define the edges of shapes, while others move lightly across the surface like unfinished thoughts. These marks create boundaries, but they also connect different areas of the image. Near the center, a strong vertical division introduces a sense of structure. Around it, rounded forms expand and contract, producing an organic counterpoint to the straighter architectural elements.
Certain shapes may suggest fragments of bodies, faces, objects, or landscapes, although none resolves into a single fixed subject. This ambiguity allows the viewer to participate in the work. One person may recognize a profile or figure, while another may see an imagined interior, a city, or a collection of memories compressed into one space. Garibay leaves these possibilities open rather than directing the audience toward one interpretation.
The composition also reflects the artist’s observation that human life unfolds moment by moment. Daily experience is rarely arranged according to a perfect plan. It is made from decisions, interruptions, encounters, and emotional reactions that accumulate over time. Garibay translates this condition into visual form. Each shape can be understood as a separate moment, while the complete composition represents the way those moments gather into a life.
Despite its many active elements, the work maintains equilibrium. Bold colors are moderated by neutral spaces, heavy outlines are offset by delicate linear details, and concentrated passages are balanced by broader areas of relative quiet. This balance prevents the image from becoming chaotic. The spontaneity remains present, but it exists within an instinctively controlled framework.
Garibay’s work ultimately invites the viewer to experience abstraction as something immediate and deeply human. The artwork does not need to be decoded like a puzzle. Its meaning emerges through color, texture, movement, and the personal associations these elements awaken. By combining improvisation with careful visual judgment, Garibay transforms an ordinary cardboard surface into a layered record of emotional experience. The piece captures life not as a predictable sequence, but as an evolving rhythm in which uncertainty, structure, memory, and feeling continually meet.
