The comical figures and toys in Joe Ramiro Garcia’s playfully provocative oil paintings animate a space that seems at once familiar and real while also being cartoon-like, slightly unsettling and mysterious. Familiar characters and everyday objects – not to mention frequent art historical references – offer both the delight of instant recognition and the riddle of a dream or an elusive memory.

Garcia is conscious that these objects have both cultural significance and individually distinct personal meanings. He sees the figures as performers in an event something like karaoke, only the event is a painting. His stuffed toys and cartoon characters are surrogates for the human condition. We know they are stand-ins and not the real thing, and at the same time we animate them, projecting onto them our stories.

The artist hesitates to explain his personal associations with these objects too specifically. “Preserving the mystery is vital to my paintings,” he says. “To over describe them is to lose something in that translation. The painting is not to be understood in terms of its fragments so much as in terms of its whole.”