CURRENT EXHIBITION

LA PINTURA TAMBIÉN ES UN CANTO- GONZALO GARCÍA

SEPTEMBER - NOVEMBER 2025

"We have been historically constructed, during patriarchal and colonial modernity, as monsters: as women, as hysterics, as homosexuals, as disabled, as mentally ill. Now we are in a process of inverting that logic of oppression. A moment in which the monsters take the floor."
—Paul B. Preciado
I Am the Monster That Speaks to You. Report for an Academy of Psychoanalysts

"The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of men is not violence against women. Instead, patriarchy demands that all men engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill the emotional parts of themselves."
—bell hooks
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Gonzalo García’s painting unfolds as a space where history, the body, and social critique converge. This series is part of a larger body of work titled Los cachorros (The Puppies), in which he deepens his pictorial research by weaving together medieval, cinematic, and religious references with contemporary concerns about gender, masculinity, and power.

Inspired by Mexican films such as Los cachorros (1973) and Nuevo orden (2020), as well as by the various pictorial versions of the biblical scene The Massacre of the Innocents, Gonzalo constructs intimate scenes of tense atmospheres suspended in an ambiguous time, where bodies, flowers, and symbols act as allegories of trauma, social violence, and the desire for transformation. Castration—both physical and symbolic—emerges as a conceptual axis to question patriarchal models of masculinity, as well as the fear of losing the power historically upheld by elites. In this “third act,” the chorus and the floral bouquet appear as both omen and strategy of harmonic resistance in the face of chaos, without fearing it.

Painting is also song: as an aesthetic reflection on racialization and the violence of white imperialist power against “the threatening other,” it invites us to question the role we play in the history we have been told, and whether that history is truly unchangeable. Echoing the representation of the Stations of the Cross, and resonating with the frame-by-frame structure of a non-linear storyboard, this body of work brings together pastel colors, domestic and religious symbols, and dismembered bodies (like votive milagritos) in a delirious choreography where everything can be reassembled in another way. Rather than offering an epic ode to masculine suffering provoked by androcentrism—which fears emasculation and erases other identities—Gonzalo’s painting proposes a less fixed reordering and a more porous concatenation, one that allows for a more generous and conscious exchange of identities and social relations.

Tania Ragasol