BRISBANE.- Historical photographs never intended to depict intimacy have inspired a powerful series of contemporary paintings in Cuban-born, Brisbane artist Jorge Mariño Brito's debut solo exhibition, opening at Mitchell Fine Art in Fortitude Valley Brisbane this July.
Jorge Mariño Brito trained in medicine and psychiatry before turning to contemporary art. Today, his practice combines painting, papermaking and printmaking to explore intimacy, vulnerability and emotional connection between men.
Working from historical photographic archives, Brito uncovers images of men bathing, resting and embracing photographs catalogued as military or social history but rarely recognised for the intimacy they reveal.
Visual representations of male relationships have been shaped by restrictive cultural norms that limit the expression of tenderness or emotional openness. Jorge Mariño Brito reinterprets this tradition by presenting male figures engaged in gestures of closeness, trust, and mutual care.
"Capturing an image in film takes an instant, yet painting gives a way to stay inside the camera," says Brito. "A small gesture from a photograph gets stretched across a large canvas, built up in oil, scraped back, rebuilt, until figures come forward, out of the dark, slowly, on their own terms. These paintings take time to build up, and they take time to see."
At a time when conversations around masculinity and emotional wellbeing continue to evolve, Brito's work invites viewers to reconsider overlooked histories of tenderness and connection between men.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Jorge Mariño Brito works from photographs that were never meant to be looked at in the way that he does. Vintage photographs are thoughtfully gleaned from military archives, state libraries, and the internet. Men swimming, friends resting under trees, youngsters standing shoulder to shoulder on a riverbank.
The photographs were invariably taken to record something specific, whether mere documentation or maybe a memoir. But every so often there is a hand on a shoulder, or a glance held a fraction too long that Brito reads through his worldview as an artist, a queer man and Latin American. Brito describes this as the image stops him. That moment of recognition is where each painting starts.
Capturing an image in film takes an instant, yet painting gives Brito a way to stay inside the camera. A small gesture from a photograph gets stretched across a large canvas, built up in oil, scraped back, rebuilt, until figures come forward, out of the dark, slowly, on their own terms. These paintings take time to build up, and they take time to see.
Works created from the stratopulp technique run on a different logic where discarded men’s clothing is beaten down to fibre and applied as a pulp in thin layers to create layers within which the images are synchronously embedded. Clothes play an ad hoc role in this exhibition, at times they are worn, at times they are shed or piled by the water; and here they become the fabric of the artwork itself.
Yet it’s not the subject matter but the emotional tension that holds these diverse works together in an achingly beautiful space. The intimacy between men. Intimacy between friends. Intimacy between lovers, at the river. Sometimes it is touch, sometimes just presence, or a gaze, even desire; the simple joy of looking at a body. Brito is not making an argument. He is looking, closely and with evident pleasure, at how much these images actually hold.
