"What does it mean to be a man?
This is the question at the heart of Los Angeles-based painter Ryan Robichaux’s debut solo exhibition, “Growing Pains,” on view at Schlomer Haus Gallery in the Castro.
The vibrant, gestural oil paintings depict scenes of men engaged in paradigmatically masculine activities — throwing a football, arm wrestling — but the power of these pictures lies in their intimacy.
Robichaux, who is transgender, began working on the series while recovering from gender-affirming surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic. The romance depicted in the paintings is twofold. On the one hand, it displays platonic friendship between men. On the other, it shows a vision of masculinity to which the artist aspired as a child.
Even the exhibition title refers to a side effect of biologically male adolescence, which Robichaux once yearned to experience.
The aspiration to masculinity — a mode often associated with culture’s more toxic trends — formulates itself as both a sense of yearning and of dysphoria in Robichaux’s negotiation of manhood. (...)"
