Jacques Garnier’s works are carefully composed, sparse images that evoke the feeling of abandonment of architectural structures, yet within the compositions he creates totally new spaces. In the last several years, the Laguna Beach artist has focused more closely on the details of the structures that he records, dissecting them into distinct and independent parts of the original.

In Hymns to the Silence at Laguna Art Museum, Garnier’s high-contrast, black and white photographs are carefully composed, detailed images of parts of architectural structures in Southern California. By finely focusing on the details, and with an eye to graphic composition and the use of negative space, he has created new images for the viewer to contemplate.

The negative space is Ma, a Japanese word meaning “gap,” “space,” or “pause.” In a work of art, Ma exists as an emptiness yet to be filled, a silence “between the notes which make the music.” The negative spaces in these new works are indeed a hymn to the silence. For Garnier’s Hymns to the Silence, the idea of Ma is embedded in the very title of the collection itself.