Mind Set Art Center is delighted to present João Gabriel’sdebut exhibition” Nightfall” in Taiwan. João Gabriel is a young Portuguese artist with a prolific painting practice centred on capturing erotic male figures that exist in a world between figuration and abstraction. The exhibition includes his recent works from 2017-2020, oil on canvas and works on paper. We extend a warm welcome to all of you to come and join the opening reception, which is set on 23 April at 3pm.
The works displayed in Nightfall take as a point of departure, vintage gay porn movies from the 1970s, at a pre-AIDS period and golden era for gay erotica and publishing, which had begun during the 1950s, when such material circulated in an increasingly flexible legal environment. Departing from here, Gabriel’s work, although suggestive, goes beyond the act of representation itself and contributes to normalize queer and homoerotic narratives in contemporary painting today. These works depict moments that occur around nightfall, and their dusk like lightning, while allowing us to see the scene, suddenly modifies the way we perceive things. That shift in perception is precisely what João Gabriel’s proposes with his work, by challenging the pervasive link between heterosexuality and masculinity, flipping stereotypes of what ‘gay’ should look like, or inverting the erotic gaze, which usually falls on the objectified body of women, but now invades the intimacy of male encounters.
The experience these artworks contain, and the experience they share, is presented as a visual entity that reveals suspended actions, images which clearly assume their representational and fictional content while revealing an intense pictorial nature. They expand perception through a haptic relationship with the object-painting, allowing us to identify ourselves with its physical, material and tactile properties. All domains of perception are appealed to by João Gabriel, as the body of the observer is necessarily invoked and implicated in the process of reading his works – a body which approaches and withdraws, which scrutinizes, and observes, playfully alternating between the focus on the details and the underlying structure of the big picture. Although there is a potential of narrative possibilities in these paintings, their plot falls entirely on the observer who is left to wander through the gratification of conjecture and visual delight.
