GIDEON RUBIN - Fox Jensen Gallery

GIDEON RUBIN

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In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

– Friedrich Nietzsche

There is much about Rubin’s paintings themselves that carry or rather transmit something crucial about optimism. Amidst the tender introspection and melancholia that accompanies some of his images and the sheer joy and sensuality that radiates from others, Rubin’s special capacity is to remind us about longing and desire, about loss and lament – and about hope and what it means to feel.

There is a deep nostalgia for photography in Rubin’s work, though it isn’t the mannered digital imagery that saturates popular media, rather the images he seeks often have a DIY romanticism, a backyard informality and reassuring comfort. Often unassuming in scale, the brushwork has a similarly undemonstrative character and yet the candour and occasional immodesty of the subjects is utterly engaging and human. The casualness he records suggests a Polaroid Instant camera moment – personal and authentic, treasured and folded in the back of a wallet. There is a pervasive sense of tenderness in the images though many are touched with a quiet melancholia, some with hardship and adversity.

FEATURED WORKS

In his determinedly colloquial erotica, there is less of the sexual voyeurism that we are made deliciously complicit with in a Balthus painting or an Eric Fischl for example, but there is an unexpected audacity to some of his imagery – the backyard striptease, the companiable blowjob are all handled with Rubin’s undemonstrative calm, conveying intimacy and warmth more than anything else.

– Andrew Jensen

Amidst this visual onslaught we live in one might rationally ask – why paint? Why would one slowly assemble a “lo-fi” image using the most unlikely of materials and an outdated, analogue process that is frankly terribly difficult and time consuming, especially when we are all armed with smartphones loaded with pictures of food, holiday destinations, pets, and poorly lit homegrown erotica? Don’t we have all the images we could ever need? Well apparently not. And if I ever wanted proof of the urgency to have images reconstituted in this archaic manner – at this political and social nexus – at this existential junction, it is the paintings of Gideon Rubin.

Looking at Gideon’s paintings one certainly has the feeling that he shared something with each of the sitters. The children, the swimmers, the Red Army soldier, the dancers, the women, the landscape, the lovers – all somehow his and through the unorthodox facial anonymity, he somehow lets them be ours too. Despite the lack of ostentation and flourish in the brushwork, these are paintings made with a great affection for the act of painting and the communicative power of tone and composition. A corner of linen may be left exposed, if need be, reminding the viewer, as it did the artist, that it’s weft and weave affect, the behaviour of the pigment, the range of the gesture and therefore the genesis of the image. As fine as the tooth of the linen is, as compliant as the oil paint may be in his various preparations, there is resistance and therefore unanticipated intent in his gesture. Increasingly there can be beautifully stained areas of pigment, surfaces that leaven the composition and the structure of the work.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

– Mark Twain

EXHIBITIONS

These are paintings that seamlessly merge ideas and aesthetics. Rubin understands that painting is, in itself, conceptual, but that our digestion of art is a profoundly sensate proposition and without this capacity to feel, in either making and indeed reception, then we are going to be left wanting. No such fate here.

– Andrew Jensen, 2021

Gideon Rubin is an Israeli painter (b. 1973) who is now located in London. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York (1999), followed by a Master of Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art at the University College in London (2002). Since then, Rubin has travelled and worked globally with residencies in China, the US and Israel. His works are held in notable public and private collections internationally such as the Herzliya Museum for Contemporary Art in Israel and the Speyer Family Collection in New York.

Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word but the naked terror?

To the lonely themselves it wears a mask.

The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. – Joseph Conrad

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PULL FOCUS WITH GIDEON RUBIN. ART COLLECTOR 2020

LAWRENCE CARROLL

FEATURED WORKS

ARTIST CATALOGUE

EXHIBITIONS

ENQUIRE ABOUT THE ARTIST

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