Until next May 21 you can visit the highly recommended Gino Rubert exhibition in Tecla Sala (Hospitalet).
Its title – Fatamorgana – refers to mirages and coincides with that of a Werner Herzog film where the world appeared as a strange and sometimes sublime place, populated by strange or derisory people.
Rubert's painting, however, refers more to other authors. In the history of art, it means a synthesis of different visions and conceptions, which can include everything from Bosch to the funny eroticism of Pat Andrea.
But the meaning of his work would also be located in a line of continuity whose precedents are Nietzsche and Freud. The Barcelona painter has, however, a sense of humor that these two thinkers did not reach and that reminds me of films from Buñuel's Mexican period, such as Susana (Demon and Flesh) and Simón del desierto
Gino Rubert composes contemporary art altarpieces where aspects of couple relationships –or interpersonal relationships of another kind– are represented that have an impact precisely on everything that socially seeks to hide under a rug, or in the attic of sinister, incorrect, non-existent realities. recognized.
And it does so at a time that in the cultural sphere has been characterized by the proliferation –first in the United States and then in other countries– of new biempencial hypocrisies, identity obsessions to a Manichean and sectarian degree and claims of supposed political correctness carried out, in sometimes even a puritanical “witch hunt” delusion, which is not at all correct.
A possible drawback is that certain scenes that include sadistic actions or situations could lead to misinterpretations of those works. But they are fictions that refer to unavoidable realities, such as the one also represented by that wolf in the story, which devoured Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother and which in the new versions corrected by ideological censorship seems like an animal without cunning, without hunger and without sense. A pseudowolf.
On the contrary, Rubert shows himself to be as free as Freud and Nietzsche were in their time when showing realities that the old traditional Puritanism did not like in the past nor do they like now –not even in painting– to the new Puritanism. Your 21st century Gardens of Earthly Delights can look like a house party with a heavenly rooftop and seedy basement.
Pleasures, vanities and destructions are united in paintings such as the highly populated polyptych Vanity fair (an altar without a hero), from 2020-2021, which measures three by four meters and is the fourth item in a splendid series.
Fatamorgana is an exhibition that would be censored by the supporters of the cancellation, the enemies of any representation or expression that includes incorrect characters or behavior. So let's enjoy it.
Also in Tecla Sala, the exhibition Ferran Garcia Sevilla is worth a visit. Cosmos-Caos , which can be enjoyed until May 28.
At KBr Fundación Mapfre you can visit the retrospective of the photographer Ilse Bing until May 14.
In the offer of the galleries of Barcelona, it is remarkable the coincidence of three exhibitions of Spanish painters that represent different modes developed from informalism and expressionism that emerged during the post-World War and Spanish Civil War.
The first is that of Antonio Saura in his context, in Mayoral, until June 10; the Luis Feito from the fifties and sixties, at the Jordi Pascual gallery, until July 31, and the Joan Hernández Pijuan from the seventies, at the Marc Domènech gallery, from May 11 to June 30.
Another notable exhibition is the one presented by Nazario at Bombon Projects with the title Anarcoma, tú y yo, which can be seen from May 4 to June 17.
If Bombon has chosen to exhibit original comic drawings, Marlborough Barcelona has presented its first exhibition dedicated to digital art, with work by the pioneer M ark Amerika, and it can be enjoyed until May 16.
