Cocky: From The Divine To The Erotic

Chico Tabibuia
Paulus de Groot
Peter Hand
Dean Henry
George Grosz
Michael Patterson-Carver
Woodbridge Figures 
Anonymous Makers

COCKY: is a survey of aroused physical manhood. From the phallic deities of Chico Tabibuia, to the abstracted hardcore of Paulus de Groot, the exhibition is a visual investigation into a male taboo.

Drawing on Afro-Brazilian Umbanda and ancient Yoruba beliefs, the carved effigies of Brazilian sculptor Chico Tabibuia (1936 - 2007) are flush with faith. We see Exus: angelic messengers, commuting between humanity and the gods, intended both to astonish and to dominate. Their effect is immediate and compelling, just as the self-taught Tabibuia was himself compelled to make them. Yet their rationale is elusive: divinely inspired, coded, unspoken.

Christened Francisco Morales da Silva, Chico Tabibuia was born into a complex ancestry of enslaved labourers and Portuguese slave-owners. His name, like his work, grew from the mighty trumpet tree (or tabibuia), native of South America, and used for many of his early carvings. Championed in his lifetime (and to some extent exoticised) by artist/educator Paulo Pardal, Tabibuia was always more than a folk artist. His work represented a bridge between the then and the now, his raw totemic figures speaking of a sacred sexuality, and reaching back in time.

Born into a family of artists, the Dutch painter Paulus de Groot (b 1977) portrays unedited fears and desires within his remarkable and explicit tableaux. Graphic scenes of macho foreplay and frame-grabs from cherished horror movies satiate the artist’s aesthetic needs. Yet it was not always so, De Groot’s hopes for a creative outlet were realised only with the nurture of Atelier Heerenplaats, a leading studio in Rotterdam for artists with disabilities. Through them, the artist’s inner life emerged; and with it, an autobiographical fantasy of graphic ambition.

De Groot’s paintings are an acknowledgement of his sexual urges, and a provocation for all who dare view them. It is an unexpurgated dream diary, where figures, outlines, positions, intentions, blur into a mass of body parts and fluids; and the paint seems almost to step off the canvas.

Much discussed and considered the peak pinnacle of American outsiderism, the rarely-seen and highly sexualised Woodbridge Figures (c 1920/40) are a diminutive community of armless caricatures, whose maker(s) and purpose(s) remain strange and unknown. Equally unknowable, and perhaps less unsettling, the dreamy pastels and watercolours of Dean Henry (c 1950 - 2010), whose illustrations of a private love-life posthumously enchanted a growing circle of devotees.

To contrast with these, the curators have selected: a hermaphroditic diorama by Peter Hand (1928 – 2004), a trained British artist and model maker, with a curious hobby of mythic exploration; a pair of satirical commentaries by artist/activist Michael Patterson-Carver (b 1958); an erotic sketch by the notorious German artist George Grosz (1893 – 1959); and an anonymous cartoonish scroll (c 1970/80), depicting the blatant eroticism of the lascivious Indian gods.

The Gallery of Everything invites all to see COCKY in the spirit in which it is intended: an elegant discussion of the heavenly, and of the very human.