Gino Rubert "True Blues"（TOKYO）

For his first exhibition at Mizuma Action, Gino Rubert presents the TRUE BLUES series. The title of the show translates as real sadness, but it also refers to the concept “true blue”, which means fidelity and loyalty between lovers or friends. In the paintings at the exhibition we can appreciate a formal step forward in Rubert’s style that has to do with the use of thread and natural hair. These elements, in addition to others such as photography, holograms or transparent plastics, that he has been applying for a while in to his paintings using a unique and elaborate collage technique, load the images with an almost unbearable realism and strength. A series of watercolors on bondage and the extremely subtle and poetic animation titled the love loop complete the exhibition.

” I believe that most of my works refer to conflicts, projections, dependencies, and mirror like experiences that occur inside the belly world of lovers. There’s also a second layer of content that often arouses from the strange state of nature that makes every human a mixture of masculine and feminine”

In his works we can find “joi de vivre”, fun, but also cannibalism, fear, and an irony that impregnates it all. Permitting the spectator to lighten more than one “rictus” or to outline a smile before he overcomes the apprehension to those women who go beyond the stereotyped femme fatal. His paintings gather all the fears that certain masculinity has been shelling throughout centuries, from the encyclical to the wise treaty supposedly scientist, in which the woman appeared not only disqualified, but also mentally ill and hysterical. But in Gino Rubert’s work, this woman dominates the masculine gender, which appears represented, by men whose faces seem to belong to another time, another epoque of totemic and dominant masculinity, that we supposed extinguished, but in no way surpassed. Men appear absorbed, devoured, thrown out by the feminine strength and sexuality.

Shown as a trimmable, unable to deal with reality and stunned by the events, but also animalized and hyper-sexualized. In this sense, the winks to the spectator are of a subtle and intelligent ambiguity. The same one that distills the interior mechanisms of thought and perception of the own artist and the impossibility to frame him in some predetermined theoretical current. On the other hand, it is undeniable that Gino Rubert (Mexico D.F., 1969), half Mexican and half Catalan, can be seen as a peculiar prodigal son of European surrealism and Latin American magical-realism.

At the moment, he lives and works in Barcelona, where he teaches painting at the art and design Schools Eina and Massana. He studied Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design. In 1993 he gains the prize for Young Artists of Sala Pares (Barcelona) and is granted to develop his work during a year at the Academy of Spain in Rome. Since then, Rubert has shown his works at numerous galleries, art centers, fairs and museums, to emphasize between these: el Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS) (Madrid), the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), the Akioshiday Art Village (Japan), el Museo de la Universidad Nacional de Bogota(Colombia), the Museum Edgar Melik (Cabriers, France). In the last years he has received subventions and scholarships such as the residence for artists at the Shuhocho Cultural Exchange House (Japan), the scholarship for the production of video works by Arte y Derecho foundation (Madrid), and has been finalist of the first prize to the Latin American video creation of Casa America (Madrid).