JOÃO GABRIEL: A place only we know

About

In all forms of dissident life, the body has always been a tool for action, a vehicle through which to claim a space or demand a right. For all these alternative identities, the use of the body becomes a symbolic form of existing in a normative world. Bodies carry meanings and their exposure carries consequences. However, putting the body on the line is not always linked to a risk and it can be performed by transgressing the boundaries of its pleasure and navigating through new experiences of desire. Pleasure and desire are powerful tools for rebellion, and it is in this joyful rebellion where João Gabriel’s paintings invite us to delve in.

This rebellious joy is the main character in João Gabriel’s paintings, a kind of joy that permeates the many places where it occurs just as the paint permeates the canvas. His inspiration comes from underground queer pornographic films produced during the 70s and 80s, depicting a pioneer representation of gay male sexuality right before the greatest contemporary pandemic, the HIV. This outbreak led to a tremendous trauma that changed the narrative of homosexual male sexuality forever, invoking death and disease and moving it away from the original innocence and eroticism still present in Gabriel’s paintings.

This exhibition is the first solo presentation of João Gabriel’s work in Spain and presents a sensual constellation that has widely evolved since the artist’s first show at our London gallery in 2019. This body of work builds a powerful narrative that exudes care and innocence, astonishingly far from its contemporary depiction in gay porn. Gabriel’s pictorial scenes are delicate and calm, compared to the violence and rush present in contemporary pornography. This might find its reason in the trauma produced by the HIV crisis – when sex, illness and death became dramatically linked -, but it could also be explained by the commodification of sex in contemporary culture where pleasure is a good to trade with.

The vigorous brushstroke in Gabriel’s paintings recalls the dense texture of the VHS films from which he takes inspiration, attracting the viewer with his extraordinary ability to delineate desiring bodies. His way of painting, though, reaches a carnality that goes beyond the bodies to spread through the nature that surrounds them, reaching as well the interiors in which these figures are letting themselves go. They are scenes of expanded joy where the light seems to conjure up the drama of the Baroque masters, shifting from gloomy interiors to sunlit outdoors. However, this light does not illuminate mythological or religious scenes as it used to, but rather bodies that indulge in an innocent desire, a present continuous with no guilt or prejudice.

A place only we know invites the visitor to gaze at these moments of intimacy, however not as a voyeur looking at the forbidden, but as the witness of an unapologetic affection that finds no reason to hide. This is where João Gabriel’s potential lies, this is where he builds empathy by putting the body on the line, rebellious, fearless, existing in a never-ending now.