With a Catalan father and Mexican mother, Gino Rubert (Mexico DF, 1969) is a visual artist and writer. With his own imaginary full of irony and eroticism, his works reveal a particular cosmos that is both beautiful and sinister, in which he almost obsessively explores the emotional and social world around us.
You have just arrived from Mexico, where you spent three months, you will be travelling to Berlin shortly, and you are now settled in Sant Martí d’Empúries and you also own an apartment in Barcelona...
Indeed I am prone to nomadic life. I like to move, detach form a place or context and settle in different one. A different language, light, social life... it is very stimulating. Not only to see ‘different’ things, which I do, but also to see the old geographies and people with a fresh eye.
What is the role that Empordà plays on your map?
It is where I have spent all the summers of my life and where most of my father’s family lived and still live. A territory that I didn’t personally discover but it has shaped me. This is also a friendly place to return to after travelling. Inevitably, it has become a common landscape in many of my paintings. These are horizons, colours, impressions that emerge by default rather than by choice.
And Mexico, your mother’s family. Is this where you developed the exhibition “Exvoto”, which you presented a year ago at the SENDA Gallery?
Certainly! I returned there after ten years and stayed for two months. It was a sweet reunion with aromas, flavours, places and people. The exhibition turned out to be a cathartic adventure! The frustrated illustrator, the novel writer, the blessed child, the Mexican Spaniard, the povera sculptor, the voyeur... everything that I am too, all together and well stirred.
Apio, Notas caninas, your first novel, had very good reviews. Will there be a second volume?
I think that my next book will be more like a collection of short stories. Many people know you as the author of the covers for the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson.
Did it represent a turning point in your career?
They have not been particularly relevant to my career... but I use them to explain what I paint when I am asked by the hairdresser or the guy next to me on the plane.
In your paintings, you use a particular collage technique, by inserting photos and other materials such as fabrics, plastics, hair or holograms into a figurative pictorial language.
Sometimes I feel like a weird drama director. The characters portrayed in photographs are actors whom I dress and locate following a script dictated by my gut more than my judgement. I feel satisfied when the images finally suggest something rather than narrating.
A twist in which photography and painting, reality and fiction, are often confused.
Exactly! I love it when people want to touch my pictures to understand what they are seeing, creating an illusion of space and action where there is none. Hence my liking for using all these real objects you are talking about.
How did you attain this collage technique that is so refined and effective?
Little by little – some forsaken portraits from the forties I found in Piazza del Popolo one drunken night; a few tricks on how to use acrylic paint that my friend and painter José de León taught me; a wig that an ex-girlfriend left in the bottom of a drawer...
And what was the last find?
Some holograms from the sixties with images of Mexico DF I found in the Lagunilla market, and some vintage postcards with colourful girls I bought last Sunday in the Sant Antoni market in Barcelona.
Three adjectives to describe your work.
Nice, good and cheap! //
