Mike Garibay is a contemporary painter working in a figurative cubist style. His canvases fracture recognizable subjects — musicians mid-performance, workers at their labor, faces caught in light — into interlocking planes of bold, saturated color, rebuilding them into images that feel at once fractured and whole. His work sits in the lineage of early modernist cubism while speaking in a distinctly contemporary register: vibrant, rhythmic, and unapologetically direct. Trained at Columbus College of Art & Design and Pasadena City College, Garibay works from a self-described "RANDOM" method — unplanned, chaotic-yet-controlled, mixed media, and entirely hand-made, never AI. He is a listed artist on Saatchi Art and a roster artist with L'Original Gallery in Montréal, with international fair showings in Paris, Seoul, and London scheduled for 2027.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

My work is about seeing twice. I take the things we think we know — a musician bent over his instrument, a face turned toward the sun, the ritual of a shared meal — and break them into their component movements: color, angle, rhythm. Cubism gave me the language; the present tense gives me the subject. I paint in bold, saturated color because feeling is never pastel. A jazz club isn't dim and tasteful when you're inside it — it's loud, hot, alive. I want my paintings to hold that charge: recognizable enough to pull you in, fractured enough to make you look again. Each piece is built in layers, reworking and resolving the composition until the planes lock into place. What remains is the energy of the original moment, reorganized — not abstracted away, but amplified.