Jorge M. Brito: This Intimate Life

Jorge M. Brito’s art practice is perhaps most notable for the experimental shifts in style he employs to convey the emotions underpinning his work. He oscillates between painting, printmaking and papermaking, and embraces chance effects in both process and mood. But what makes Brito’s practice so compelling is his investigation of intimacy and sensuality, and the lens through which we view both.

In his ongoing series of paintings based on vintage photography, Brito plays with our perception of relationships, highlighting lives and narratives lost to history through tender scenes of couples engaged in private moments. His use of scale is purposeful; their life size rendering forces the viewer to engage on a human level. Sometimes playful, but consistently poignant, they have become a vehicle through which Brito can disseminate his own history as a queer man raised in a military family under Cuba’s communist rule.

Brito fled Cuba in 2007 and subsequently lost contact with his family, friends and culture. Also lost were the tangible objects that help keep memories alive – letters, trinkets, and photos. Brito uses images sourced from the internet as a proxy, deconstructing and reassembling them alongside his recollections of the people and places he left behind. The men in these works might be lovers, but they might just as easily be close friends, brothers or cousins. He maps the figures out deliberately, before sweeping layers of colour across the canvas to envelop the scene in a haze of nostalgia.

As the series has developed, abstraction and erasure have taken an increasingly central role. Brito’s most recent portraits are ghostly traces that slip beneath the painted surface to frustrate the viewer. Where earlier works were concerned with validation and visibility, there is a sense that Brito wants to allow his current inspirations their anonymity. His consideration of intimacy has become more expansive, shifting focus from nostalgia for the past to the interplay between artwork and viewer.

Seeking more visceral engagement with his art, Brito’s newest experimentations are in paper handmade from salvaged clothing. Using a process he has refined over time, Brito manipulates the pulped cotton and linen until it begins to resemble expressive ink drawings of the male form. Once dry, these vast delicate swathes of paper are hung to flutter as the viewer moves by. Their tactility impels us to interact with them; their fragility holds us back from doing so.

By harnessing this tension, Brito conveys the crux of his contemplations – the inherent vulnerability in being human, of intimacy at a distance, and the way in which estrangement fosters attachments that are even more intense.