James Gobel has been portraying a subculture of the gay community for the past 5 years, a group he willingly decided to join when he got tired of the ubiquitous images of homosexual males. Bears are big men proud of their way-above-average weight and their hirsute dermis. Their most habitual garb is checkered shirts and jeans making them kind of urban lumberjacks, thus distancing them from the predictably stylish fag.

I Love You and I Always Will
72" x 60" acrylic felt, wool felt, yarn, & acrylic on canvas, 2007

Stylish but in a rather domestic way, Gobel’s paintings are made of very tactile materials that, while still 2D, make them spring out of the frame. The vivid felt and yarn he uses have a wholesome, grandma quality which, in a bizarrely perfect way, serves the purpose of depicting his subjects as burly odalisques amidst some gloomy yet colorful elliptical narrative.

Setting his images apart from what is commonly expected from gay artists, while retaining qualities usually associated with their craft, Gobel chooses to keep his subjects clothed because it is ultimately the outfit that bears the idiosyncrasy of his characters. Their hairy aura has been turned into a thick surface of rainbowy drama, you know, the kind that has kept Morrissey in the business for so long.

It is the crafting of this surface that reveals the queer antics in Gobel’s art: polished and meticulous, using a kind of patchwork technique of feminine associations to dress testosterone filled men who emote their masculinity rather explicitly via their massive humanity. Their specific quirks or kinks are earnestly hinted or blatantly exposed by their attire and affected poses, further defying the most conventional notions of male homosexuality.

Holding Tenderly To What Remains
35" x 28" acrylic felt, wool felt, yarn, & acrylic on canvas, 2007

Like John Banskton or the Spanish artist David Trullo, Gobel appropriates the labels that pervade the seemingly endless niches and cliques of contemporary gay men to create a bubble both eerie and joyful where the Sisyphean cycle of affirming an identity while reinventing the self is a never ending charade of dress codes, body modification and signal emission that can either scare away or attract so many epithets and monikers.

By fiercely owning the title of “bear” James Gobel manages to have fun and amuse his knowingly-or-not audience instead of whining about labels’ annoying ability to make everything easier to remember while shedding a tainted light on their grouped subjects.

Bear Hunting will be on view at Marx & Zavattero through March 29th.