Development of White Rope Series – Miriam Cabello

White Rope I and II won painting awards at the Fifth Annual International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Florence, Italy and Artoteque, London.

In this series, White Rope, featuring several striking pieces, Australian artist Miriam Cabello takes on a daring approach by destabilizing our traditional view of the Other. Her paintings bring our longstanding notion of oppression into the realm of the highly masculine, male boxer. Cabello’s intimate and provocative work considers the athletic physicality of the muscular male form juxtaposed against the subjugation and aggression often promoted by racial and gender stereotyping. She aims to shift our conventional view of the male, to twist our perception and engender new ways of thinking.

Cabello’s imagery is concerned with the human response to the binary of the black and white male. White Rope emerged from her innovative outlook towards the complex sociological and emotional aspects of such a sport. Her engagement is with ideas of difference as well as an exploration of notions relating to human physicality. The body is central, although always obliquely so. Using larger than life proportions, Cabello reconstructs her experience of a vigorous boxing match, carefully and intricately recreating the heightened emotion of the subject.

In Untitled II, a young male boxer stands serenely, his expression restrained. The piece itself however, is highly emotive. Cabello presents the traditional heroic male figure with his distinct muscular lines, then throws it into flux with the contradiction of tones of flesh, solemness of expression and ‘tears’ of paint which expose a certain vulnerability in the subject, evoking our sense of empathy and compassion.

Since childhood, Cabello has had a strong interest in the civil rights movements in both America and South Africa. She immersed herself in a myriad of mediums that dealt with civil rights and social justice issues which had an immense impact on the early development of her work. White Rope takes these concerns and focuses them on the concepts of sexuality, conflict and gender. The world of sports and in particular boxing is a key site of male domination, where aggression, bodily force, competition and physical skill are primarily associated with ‘maleness.’ Neither fetishist, grandeur nor flamboyant, Cabello’s work presents men searching for their masculine selfhood amongst the idea of healthy and powerful masculinity so insistently invoked in the muscled body. Generally coming from an underprivileged background, black boxers learned early in life that they had to fight hard to survive and succeed, an idea that Cabello accurately presents in her White Rope series.

Her artistic inspiration has transpired from an osmosis between the rapid movement of Abstract Expressionism to chiaroscuro and the urgent nature of Caravaggio’s masterly stroke. Cabello’s works demonstrate a unique technical process that at first glance, one assumes, the figures are screenprinted or airbrushed. The delicate brushstrokes and saturated colours, materialised in the form of oil on linen, pay homage to Andy Warhol’s screenprints.
In all the paintings in the White Rope series, a geometric, methodically laid grid acts as an oppressive force imprisoning the subject in isolation. This is juxtaposed with drips of paint that thrash the subject with whip-like strokes. Using glazed transparent layers that embed these strokes in the figure, Cabello constructs the works with a limited palette of three colours, yet the vibrancy and intensity is far from minimal.

The traditional male image in art is one of power, possession and domination. In White Rope, Cabello has taken the highly masculine domain of sport and contrasted it with not only the idea of the Black male as Other, but also the power of emotion, and in doing so she thus repudiates the very notions of the emblematic black male and athlete. The paintings manifest a variety of themes like adoration, fear, sexuality and ironically, tenderness. Cabello’s work in this series comments on flux and uncertainty and portrays the multifarious in-between space that thrives on the hybridity of identity and emotion.

For a fuller discussion, see
Catalogue Essay for Miriam Cabello
By Melissa Clark

References:
1. Wiggins, David K. 1997. Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America. Syracuse:NY
2. Smith, Terry. 1997. In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity. Power Institute of Fine Arts: Sydney.