Chicos Lartigue (2020)(print)

About the Artist

Rubén Lartigue (Alberti, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1972) is a contemporary reference who transforms painting into an incantation where body and myth embrace each other. In his series Chicos Lartigue, athletic and ardent young men appear as dazzling presences: naked torsos, tense and luminous, crowned with animal heads that lift them to the very summit of the imaginary, sovereign creatures that overflow the human and install themselves in the realm of the fabulous.

This is not a game of simple eroticism nor an apology for fitness beauty; his work unfolds as a critical device that interrogates the History of Art and dismantles the dominant gaze that silenced the male nude for centuries. On his canvases, classical and baroque poses are reborn under a contemporary lens, sprinkled with irony and flashes of pop culture, becoming a theater of gestures, lights, and tensions. Here the sacred merges with the profane, the intimate with the wild, the solemn with the irreverent. His boys seduce and provoke, yet they also return to the viewer their own reflection, making them accomplices of fascination, of guilt, and of the pleasure of looking.

His painting does not fear excess; it vindicates artifice as truth, turning the image into a stage and desire into its protagonist. In every stroke pulses resistance, hedonism, and the boldness of an artist who transforms the canvas into a rite of pleasure and rebellion. Chicos Lartigue are celebration and resistance: a visual ritual that summons us to imagine other freedoms of the body, of desire, and of beauty itself, where the human reaches its fiercest and most splendid invention.