"Mirage" by Gino Rubert at the Tecla Sala Art Center

The Tecla Sala Art Center will host, between October 6 and January 2023, the exhibition Fatamorgana , by the Catalan artist of Mexican roots Gino Rubert (Mexico DF, 1969). Throughout his career, Rubert has worked in very diverse disciplines that embrace from the design of impossible clothing or writing to dramaturgy and acting in the performance El Mundo del Arte , premiered in 2021 at the Romea Theater in Barcelona However, the technique that best defines Gino Rubert's art is undoubtedly painting.

In the exhibition in question, curated by Gisela Chillida in collaboration with Roc Parés, the artist will show both the collage paintings for which he is well known in dialogue with rarities from his studio and recent paintings that incorporate light and sound. Gino Rubert described his painting technique like this in an interview given by Chillida in 2015: "I feel satisfied when the images finally suggest more than narrate. [...] I love that people want to touch my paintings to understand what they are seeing, to create the illusion of space and action where there is neither. Hence the taste for using the real objects you talk about [photographs, fabrics, plastics, hair, etc.].”

In total, more than a hundred works - some unpublished, others from international collections -, of which a good number of pieces on paper, less known but of decisive interest to understand the process creative of the artist. In fact, exhibition-wise, curator and artist have conspired to intervene in the rooms of the art center and blur the borders that separate the interior of the pictorial scene from the environment that physically hosts it.

The title of the exhibition, Fatamorgana , refers to the optical effect linked to thermal inversion that causes objects on the horizon to take on a floating appearance. It is this point of unreality or strangeness that is so present in Rubert's work that is also decisive in the dialogue that the aforementioned intervening rooms will establish with the viewer and with the works on display. It is also worth reviewing the relevance of the "mirage" in Gino Rubert's biography: it is a nightclub in Sant Martí d'Empúries where the artist had spent many evenings partying.

Recently, we were able to see Rubert's work exhibited at the National Museum of Art of Catalonia, with the piece Vanity Fair (an altar without a hero) , a postmodern altarpiece that according to the artist portrays a certain world of art in which they appear artists, collectors, etc. for whom he feels admiration or friendship, without any kind of geographical or historical disciplinary order.