• GINO RUBERT solo show, October 2023

    GINO RUBERT solo show

    October 2023

    My latest paintings drawings and objects respond to two concerns. On the one hand, there’s the need to represent the sentimental and social world around me, in an effort to somehow understand it and in this way keep it at a healthy distance; hence the irony, the humour or the magical air of these representations. On the other hand, there’s the will to desacralize the creative act as well as the artwork itself by giving them such prosaic and profane functions as thanking or begging.

    The inexpressive Black and White photography portraits, old and new, have been long present in my work. I think this has to do with a certain obsession with death and how it gazes at us from the bottom of other people’s eyes. By transforming and relocating these characters in new roles and sets I’d say I aspire to or somehow play with the idea of “bringing the dead back to life”. - Gino Rubert

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  • Artworks selection

    collage, oil on canvas, mix media

  • GINO RUBERT: A FLEETING BEAUTY

    DR. WILLIAM JEFFETT CHIEF | CURATOR AT THE SALVADOR DALÍ MUSEUM, ST PETERSBURG, FLORIDA

    Gino Rubert is a figurative painter, but despite his origins in pictorial realism, his works are highly deceptive and far more complex than initially meets the eye. At times he mixes photography with painting, embedding the photographic image in the surface of the painting; at others he uses a sort of collage language, for example using real thread or cords sewn or sutured into the surface of the canvas. As these are represented in these works, here the real object doubles for that of the pictorial illusion. Perhaps as an extension of this concern, in several more recent works Rubert has embedded in the surface, using an apparatus behind the surface, elements of light that change, and contribute to the pictorial illusion and subjects represented in the canvases, thus presenting an alternation between images hidden and then revealed through transparency. The use of these collage elements is far from disruptive, and there is
    a kind of seamless quality of the surface as if all is invisibly ‘sutured’, to borrow an expression from film editing. Such concern can find precedents in surrealism, as in Dalí’s early surrealist work, for example,     Le Main (1930) or Les premiers jours du printemps (1929), where photos are similarly embedded seamlessly in the surface of the paint surface.

     

    The majority of Rubert’s figures are positioned in interiors and they are distributed within these spaces in rather awkward and therefore disorienting positions. While the resulting composition is complex and carefully constructed there is a strangeness to the figure’s 

    awkward distribution within the composition. According to Rubert, following his period in Rome, he began to work with photography, and the paintings take their point of departure not in the overall composition, but in the initial distribution of the photographic elements, the majority of which are faces. These then determine the evolution of the position of the bodies represented, and from there the rest of the composition. The disorienting and sometimes bizarre position of the figures is reinforced by the representation of some of them as dolls or mannequins, even as puppets in some cases.