Ricardo Partida

Who society chooses to make a hero matters, and throughout history, the alpha-male and, more specifically, the athlete has long been the one to uphold and perpetuate these standards. For Ricardo Partida’s first solo exhibition with Deli Gallery, Death of a Hero, Rise of a Champion, the artist presents nine new paintings that disrupt these conventional ideas of gender.

Narratives constructed around cis-male athletes perpetuate backward and harmful tropes of masculinity and boy/manhood. Their names become synonymous with success and greatness, giving them immense power and influence. Partida grew up in South Texas, where sports play a significant role in the community, and with these paintings, he endorses a new kind of hero—the Fag Fatale, an effeminate man bringing the world to its knees. Using the visual language of figura serpentinata, his works create surrogacies of seduction that aim to question and disturb power structures.

Partida attributes this body of work to Carol Ockman’s 1995 text, “Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies” and Ingres’s use of the serpentine line, shifting the representation of the heroic male in art to the homoerotic, sensual male nude, therefore creating an ‘other’ in gendered visual language. Partida creates figures of desire by combining Femme Fatale aesthetics with neoclassic depictions of Greek Mythology. The subjects in each painting, fueled by Bossy Bottom Energy, represent avatars of fantasy for Partida, a form of cosplay in which he can project his desires onto the canvas.

The artist’s free-flowing process results in vivid and unfurling compositions that guide the viewer through a map of detailed and loose brushwork. Partida’s dramatic and bold use of color is his way of actively working against color theory. Understanding color in terms of frequency, or vibrato, the artist believes all colors work together and is more interested in the tension vibrant colors can create next to each other.

In these paintings, the Bossy Bottoms become the idols in which we worship, confronted by their seductive gazes and their desires to disturb and break free from the limits of heteronormativity.