I could write a text about João Gabriel’s painting: about how it is constructed, layer upon layer, from images taken from pornographic films from the 1970s and 80s, about how his works oppose systemic heteronormativity on all social fronts , and therefore on all places in art, about how important it is to invert the erotic gaze, which always falls on the objectified body of the woman, so that this time it invades the privacy of the man. I could, but I could also write about everything else that, I have come to discover, inhabits João Gabriel's growing universe of images. Not that everything mentioned is not important: it is, and always will be. But it is also important to go beyond that, after all, João Gabriel always paints beyond the limits of the canvas, why would we want all of this to fit into a cinematographic frame?

João Gabriel has the ability, when painting, to stick the sensitive to the canvas. The men featured in his works are dressed in a sensibility that, according to stereotypes, is not characteristic of them. At the same time, this sensitivity spreads to the everyday spaces represented, many of them inspired by places that the artist himself inhabits, or that still live in his memory. Landscapes, houses, bodies, all are specters (there is also a certain sensitivity in this word, which, for example, does not exist in ghosts), diffuse memories of day and night, of the full moon or the sunbeam. João Gabriel's paintings are for the eyes what beautiful words like these are for the language.

When we say that, at night, all cats are gray, we are obviously talking about a spectrality such as only felines can have. Gray is a poorly defined color, between black and white, with little visibility. Perhaps during the night many things become invisible like cats, but many others are outlined, illuminated, against the darkness, like the figures we observe through open windows, or bodies bathed in the light of a moon. Perhaps at night the images are more sensitive, and where intimacy proliferates (after all, it is in the dark that movies are best seen).

In the paintings, bodies can be glimpsed at a distance. It is in this twilight, looking at the characters of these stories and the actions frozen in a time impossible to locate, that the cats are found. Slender observers, their contours as undefined as those of the figures they draw against the darkness, are passive spectators of what is done in the shadows. They are the ones who see who looks and who is looked at, without ever intervening in the frame, existing in an untouchable plane of a narrative as malleable and lewd as its complexion. At night, all bodies, and all cats, are gray.