João Gabriel at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Artist: João Gabriel

Exhibition title: Almost Blue

Curated by: Nuno de Brito Rocha and Benedikt Johannes Seerieder

Venue: Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

Date: July 2 – October 2, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Kunstverein Braunschweig

With Almost Blue, Kunstverein Braunschweig presents João Gabriel’s (*1992 in Leiria, Portugal) first institutional solo exhibition in Germany. João Gabriel’s works are a sensuous and mysterious game of hide and seek. Despite their fast, vivid brushstrokes, sparse edges and contouring, they offer wholly realistic manifestations of bodies and landscapes. As soon as one grasps the image, it disappears. Gabriel’s works bear witness to tenderness and tranquility, showing bodies surrendering to desire without guilt or prejudice.

Much of the artist’s practice is inspired by porn films from the “queer underground” of the 70s and 80s, which were produced for an invisible audience.

Hence, the real protagonists of the paintings are the sensual affection and the furtive gaze of an observer. João Gabriel’s works bear witness to tenderness and tranquillity, they show bodies surrendering to their desire without guilt or prejudice. His painterly inspiration is also inspired by the masters of the Baroque. Thus, the virtuoso play of light and shadow in his works also reflects the drama in man.

João Gabriel’s paintings are created by an anachronistic trick: he rewinds digitised VHS films to a scene of his choice, pauses the video and transfers the frozen images to the canvas using digital tools. The landscapes and spaces depicted in this way, but above all the coexistence of bodies, are moments captured in paint that mix the fictional and the real, the present and the memory. His paintings and pictorial investigations are based on an abstracted recourse to these fictional images and draw on a deep chromatic scale. The poetics of colour, the pausing of time and the affection of bodies for each other can be discovered in his sensual paintings.

João Gabriel (born 1992 in Leiria, Portugal) currently lives in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. He graduated in Fine Arts from the College of Fine Arts and Design in Caldas da Rainha in 2016. He has been included in various exhibitions, including A Place Only We Know, The RYDER Madrid, 2021, O lume dos olhos, a luzir no escuro, Lehmann + Silva Gallery, Porto, 2019, Don’t you remember why we came here for?, The RYDER London, 2019, De noite, todos os gatos, Galeria do Teatro da Politécnica, Lisbon, 2019, The Third Bank, Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art, 2019, A Permit for that Fire , Galería Mascota, Mexico City, 2018. The artist was a laureate of the EDP Foundation New Artists Award in 2017.

João Gabriel, Almost Blue, 2022, Exhibition View at Kunstverein Braunschweig 2022, Courtesy: the artist and Kunstverein Braunschweig, photo: Joe Clark