In this exhibition, César Gabler presents a collection of paintings that explore male power and vulnerability in a game of words with the title of the Rolling Stones' 1968 song.
The exhibition brings together a group of works on canvas and paper in which the artist approaches the male imaginary using diverse sources. References to cinema, photonovels, painting, comics and graphic humor appear to capture different images of the masculine. A portrait of the defeated, the defeated, the decadent. Also of naive romantics or cliché gallants.
These last years, masculinity has been confronted with questions from feminism and sexual dissidence. Men, as creators of patriarchy, seem to be reduced to the role of victimizers. Rather than exculpating or defending the dominant male, the exhibition investigates from various visual sources, images and models, which have always been present, but do not appear so often in gender roles conversations. “There is always a vanquished, a powerless, a desperate one. Munch painted that, and so did the cartoonists with their suicides leaving a note to Mr. Judge. Modern culture, popular or avant-garde, left much more varied, ambiguous or complex images than we usually remember,” Points out the author in his notes.
Gabler looks at strength, seduction, economic success, as the pillars of a triumphant masculinity, but also -and above all- at its reverse side. Here the males appear sad, weak, humiliated. Defeated in a competition they did not choose. Men as victims: of themselves, of the system, of their desires. Of their own weakness.
Using a varied pictorial and graphic language, the author explores the possibilities of color and drawing, reinterpreting figurative traditions, with emphasis on the gesture, the stain, the stroke.
