The paintings of João Gabriel are intimate translations of imagery taken from 1970s gay pornographic films. His paintings embody themes of desire, loss and nostalgia. Disinterested in the contemporary ideals of masculinity and their portrayals, Gabriel turns to vintage gay pornography as a source material to address the male form. His revisiting of the pre-AIDS era speaks to a notion of inherited trauma, and a desire to question the boundaries of joy, fear and sexuality in contemporary queer culture.
Gabriel’s pictures are not the equivalent of their subject, but translations of it. As closely as they synch with their pornographic referents, they equally replace the unflinching directness of those films, with a more diffuse approach to image and subject. Their ghostly impressionism obfuscates salacious detail. At the same time, this same effect lends the pictures coy, flirty agency. They become echoes, emptied of descriptive subtlety but for that reason rich with another, stranger sonority.
João Gabriel was born in Portugal in 1992 and lives and works in Caldas da Rainha.
