(continued from DECONSTRUCTED T-SHIRTS)

On the other hand, Gallego's Shirt Paintings (2019) are produced in a similar vein but are, as their titles suggest, much more painterly. Instead of monochromatic white shirts, Gallego’s primary source for these works are vintage men’s button-down shirts from the 1950s and 60s—garments they long to wear but, according to the artist, never quite fit. These garments are cut up and arranged in large assemblages, forming complex topographies that extend in multiple directions, somewhat reminiscent of the sprawling outline of a gerrymandered congressional district. Structural and functional details from these garments—pointed collars, patch pockets, or a long, ridged, button-holed placket—are flattened and incorporated into these re-constructions, while the surface is altered further by carefully cut holes.  Gallego follows a trajectory laid by a number of artists using textiles in formal abstraction—Richard Tuttle, Sigmar Polke, and Blinky Palermo, to name a few. But Gallego’s work is beyond surface: the works on view extend the artist’s project interrogating and dismantling masculine archetypes, in particular the image of the American rebel, personified by actors like Marlon Brando, James Dean and Steve McQueen in mid-century American film, in a white t-shirt and jeans.

It is no accident the shirts Gallego uses for the Shirt Paintings allude to a synchronous period. Conjured by mass media, this conventional, pervasive and ultimately toxic image of masculinity is desirable (to become that archetype) but unattainable. It is in fact a skewed representation of gender that Gallego chooses to skew further into new territories in order to grapple with the allure of this archetype, as well as dismantle its potency. Gallego elaborates:   “And what I am seeing in these dissections, is the same thing I did to my body when I underwent gender confirmation surgery, when I opened up my own body in order to create something new. It’s through my transformation that I am seeing I can remake these garments in a similarly anomalous form, so that they may visually speak to a body that has had no real point of origin itself.”