Galerie Kitsuné | Exhibition calendar – on view | Pepo Moreno

OCTOBER 6 - NOVEMBER 6

It's ok to cry, an exhibition by Pepo Moreno

Galerie Kitsuné is pleased to present ‘It’s ok to cry’, an exhibition by Pepo Moreno, a Paris-based artist, born in Spain in 1985.

‘It’s ok to cry’, the solo exhibition of new work by artist Pepo Moreno, is dedicated to everyone who was forced to build emotional walls around themselves as a child. It acknowledges this process as a necessary and desperate act of self preservation from the persistent hatred, pain and mockery that went hand in hand with being an outcast. It is also a reminder to all of us adults who have survived and even flourished, despite all those experiences that encouraged us to loathe ourselves.

Invoking repetition and naïveté as well as a bold use of color and gesture, Moreno created this body of work while visiting his hometown in Southern Catalonia–returning to the places where he was first bullied as a queer kid, where he began to reject his own identity and isolate himself. Moreno’s work encourages dialogue around mental health; emphasizing that acknowledging and articulating personal trauma is a crucial step in the healing process.

We can – we must – cry. We owe it to the children we were and to the adults we have become. We need to think of crying as something to embrace as an act of self-care. We could maybe then change the perception crying – no longer just an act of grief, but rather as a journey into our deepest, most honest manifestation of joy.

“It’s ok to cry” opens October 6, 2022 at Galerie Kitsuné Brooklyn and remains on view through November 6, 2022.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Pepo Moreno was born in Spain in the last years of what we now call the Millennial Generation. He grew up drawing at his hometown in the countryside and spent his young adulthood flirting with a singer career while pursuing a BA in Communication and Advertising.

Forever an enemy of the closet and a friend to the arts, he moved to ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin, where he gained first-hand experience on how broad the spectrum of queerness could really be. It was then when his first series of drawings in between the sad, the gay and the ugly blossomed.

Today Pepo lives in Paris, and his paintings have grown to become both a mock and a celebration of gay stereotypes in Western pop culture. On the superficial –the aesthetics–, his work explores a myriad of saturated colours using different variations of acrylic painting techniques. Deep down –at heart– it embraces some of the contradictions of the modern queer life experience: from the sheer gayness of being out, proud and simply alive, to the forever young, forever beautiful obsession that often hides the loneliness and isolation of being an outcast.

This is a gay book by Pepo Moreno

Many of us grew up in a world where nothing was gay only to soon discover that, according to some, everything has become too gay. Pepo Moreno’s acrylic on paper pieces, which with shaky stroke and saturated colors represent food, celebrities, plants, drugs, animals, saints, politicians, feelings, dictators and entities with wild eyes and smiles frozen in time, work as celebration, parody and demands of the gay agenda which corrupts the world. The gay agenda
is gay. If everything is gay, nothing is. One’s own gay existence, like the technique of these illustrations, cannot be learnt. It is dissident, amoral and free. Gay existence, much like this book, is full of strange icons, grief, errors, anarchy, fetishes, feathers, masculinity, onanism, insane desire, self-loathing, love and garbage. All that is also gay and is drawn with a childish stroke, because immaturity is gay and because actually all children are gay.

Consuming culture embodied in a physical object in the year 2022 is gay and paying for a book too see things that are available for free on Instagram is gay. But now money is gay. And Pepo Moreno too.