For Mike Garibay, color offers a way to give feeling a visible shape. Working with oil paint and oil pastels, he moves between abstraction and representation, allowing gesture, texture, and composition to guide the character of each piece. His practice encompasses expansive canvases and smaller works on panels, bringing different scales to an ongoing exploration of visual relationships. Within his abstract compositions, irregular forms and spontaneous marks establish rhythms that feel intuitive yet carefully held together. A saturated passage can draw the eye forward, while a quieter area creates room to pause. Shapes suggest associations without settling into a single explanation, leaving viewers free to follow their own responses. Garibay’s work develops through these exchanges: between movement and stillness, density and openness, recognition and uncertainty. Rather than depending on a fixed narrative, his paintings invite attention to the emotional possibilities of color and the expressive character of a mark.
Color, Texture, and the Space Between
The two artworks presented here reveal how Garibay builds visual interest through the meeting of contrasting colors and differently defined edges. Deep blue, forest green, mustard yellow, and warm earth tones form a shared vocabulary, yet each composition gives those colors a different role. One image emphasizes soft transitions and granular texture; the other places irregular colored forms against pale spaces with more distinct boundaries. Viewed together, they suggest how a limited palette can support varied experiences of weight, movement, and distance.
In the first artwork, golden yellow occupies the upper portion of the image, extending toward a pale, sandy passage on the right. A dark green mass advances diagonally from the left, meeting an intense blue form that spreads across the lower right. These areas do not fit together as clean geometric units. Their edges appear broken, feathered, or rubbed into the surrounding surface, making the encounters between colors as engaging as the colors themselves.
The blue passage creates a particular sense of direction. Its broad central area narrows and branches toward the right, while a pale indentation interrupts it from below. This interruption prevents the blue from becoming a single, closed shape. Instead, the eye follows its uneven perimeter, moving between projecting edges and recessed spaces. The nearby green introduces greater darkness, while the yellow above lends warmth to the composition. Together, these relationships establish a balance that remains active rather than symmetrical.
Texture gives this image another register of expression. Small variations across the surface make the color appear particulate, with lighter specks and darker deposits interrupting otherwise broad passages. The result invites close looking. From a distance, the work reads through its main color relationships; nearer inspection reveals a less uniform surface. Although the forms might recall coastlines, vegetation, or terrain seen from above, these remain possible associations rather than clearly depicted subjects. The image holds that uncertainty without requiring it to be resolved.
The second artwork introduces a more pronounced exchange between colored masses and pale surrounding areas. A broad blue shape stretches across the upper middle, deepening toward near black along its lower left edge. On the right, it extends into a narrow diagonal projection. Warm tan areas interrupt and border this form, creating an arrangement that can feel almost recognizable before slipping back into abstraction. Its character depends partly on that hesitation: the viewer searches for a subject, then returns to the physical arrangement of color.
Below, a mustard yellow area provides a counterweight to the darker upper form. A thin red line descends from beneath the blue and bends toward the yellow, introducing a small but insistent change in scale. Beside the broader masses, this narrow mark feels unusually precise. It creates a visual connection across the pale interval while adding a warmer accent. The pale spaces also play an active role, separating forms and allowing their uneven contours to remain legible.
Across both works, Garibay makes composition an experience of relationships. Blue feels different beside green than it does beside tan; yellow shifts in character when surrounded by pale space. These changes give the paintings their emotional range without assigning each color a fixed meaning. Their appeal rests in sustained observation: noticing where an edge dissolves, where a dark passage gathers weight, or where a small line redirects attention. Garibay’s abstractions offer room for interpretation while remaining grounded in the immediate experience of looking, allowing feeling to arise through color, texture, and the spaces that hold them together. Each viewing can begin with a different detail and gradually disclose another route through the composition, keeping the encounter open beyond its first impression.
