There is Gabriel Garcia: soft-spoken, cherub-faced, funny, polite.

Then there is his art: raw-looking paintings and meticulous ink drawings with collage that depict severed human heads, some embellished with cutout paper flowers that somehow only serve to make the pieces more disturbing.

"They're kind of shocking," Garcia says. "There's no way around it, really."

A newly minted graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Garcia recently returned to his native San Antonio for "Invisible Threads," an alumni exhibit at SAY Sí.

He and David Cordero are the featured artists in the curated show celebrating the youth art program's 15th anniversary. It is on display through Friday at SAY Sí Central, 1518 S. Alamo St.

"Every time I come here, I feel so comfortable," says the 25-year-old, flopping down in a chair in SAY Sí's library. "It's like coming back to the pad."

Garcia, who grew up on the West Side, participated in the youth arts program from 1998 to 2002, building on skills he began developing as a graffiti artist, then as a student in art classes at Healy-Murphy Center.

"I see a lot of the work that he did at SAY Sí — the materials and mediums he learned — still referenced in his work," says executive director Jon Hinojosa.

But, at least in regard to his work in "Invisible Threads," it is Garcia's subject matter that is most striking. For about a year, the artist has been working on what he refers to simply as "the heads."

"A lot of where this idea came from is . . . being in Chicago. I've been paying attention to a lot of the violence that's been going on in the city," he says. "Since I've been up there for a little bit over six years, it's just become this thing you read in the paper."

The series is also a response to violence Garcia was exposed to as a child, both in pop culture and real life. When Garcia was a child, his family's home near St. Mary's University became a target for drive-by shootings after his older brothers got into a dispute with gang members. On one occasion, a bullet shattered a front window, narrowly missing Garcia's sister.

Though no one in his family was hurt and the attacks eventually stopped, "it scarred me to the point where I have this underlying kind of paranoia (that) any moment something is going to happen to me," Garcia says.

"And the severed head, as a symbol, has always represented the worst thing I could ever imagine happening to a person — a loved one, or just anyone. It's such a powerful statement that that's kind of where I felt I needed to start."

For two of the paintings with collage, Garcia tore images from the pages of free magazines distributed around Chicago.

"I kind of approached these pieces, trying to reassemble the images that I destroyed and kind of create my own portraits or my own profiles of these anonymous people," Garcia says.

As the series has evolved, Garcia has attempted to make the images less graphic. In his ink drawings, the heads are more abstract. Only close inspection reveals a tuft of hair here, an eye there.

Garcia began working on the series when he was at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, creating papier-m‚chÈ sculptures of heads he buried in shallow trenches in a courtyard. His instructors loved them, Garcia says, but his fellow students kept mum during critiques.

"I think they were taken aback by it," he says.

Last month, Garcia graduated from the art school.

"For me, it was one of the biggest achievements of my life being able to graduate from there," he says.

Without encouragement from Hinojosa and SAY Sí founder Mike Schroeder, Garcia might not have gone on to art school.

In high school, Garcia says, he struggled with academics. After a brief stint at Jefferson High School, Garcia transferred to Healy-Murphy Center, a self-paced program. Eventually, he left without a diploma, earning a GED instead. But while Garcia was at the center, an art teacher introduced him to SAY Sí.

As a child, Garcia drew comics and earned spending money selling tattoo designs to classmates for a quarter apiece. In middle school, he taught himself "some of the basic fundamentals of design" as a tagger.

"But not until I joined this program is like when I really started learning about art and, like, the canon of art history and, like, some of the masters and some of the other . . . fundamentals of being able to draw and being able to paint, " he says.

Two years ago, Garcia and Cordero, a close friend who also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, were asked to return to SAY Sí — this time as mentors in the Alumni Summer Apprentice Program.

"They were the first alumni to come back and work in the studios and did such a great job," Hinojosa says.

Garcia is preparing to move back to San Antonio. He is also working on more heads for a show in mid-July at Studio 2410 in the King William neighborhood.

Garcia says he doesn't worry about what people may think of him when they see his work.

"I just don't want to upset anybody," he says. "That's why now I'm trying to find a different kind of strategy of creating this image, but not having it (be) as shocking as it is. It's not really working, I guess. People are like, 'Oh, it's a severed head. That's disturbing.' "