Cinématique: Gideon Rubin with Luis Baylón and Martine Gutierrez by RYAN LEE Gallery

CINÉMATIQUE RUBIN GUTIERREZ BAYLÓN OCTOBER 29— DECEMBER 23 2026

Gideon Rubin BIRD, 2025 Luis Baylón RAYITO DEL SOL, 1995 PEKÍN NIÑO POMPAS, 2016

Gideon Rubin BUBBLES, 2026 WHITE ROSE, 2026

Luis Baylón PAREJA METRO BESO, n.d.

Gideon Rubin UNTITLED, 2025 Luis Baylón EL DIAMANTE, 2004 PAMELA, 2003

Luis Baylón ÉXITO SIN PRECEDENTES, 2000

Gideon Rubin HANDBAG, 2026

Gideon Rubin WHITE BRA, 2025 Luis Baylón PEKÍN ZAPATOS LAZO, 2016

Gideon Rubin UNTITLED, 2026 Luis Baylón UN VICIO, 1987 LA DOÑA NO FUMA SOLA, 1999

VALLEY OF MIRRORS

MICHAEL FAMIGHETTI

“No prosthetic noses were involved!” Martine Gutierrez insists while explaining how she produces her beguilingly constructed photographs. She is referencing The Hours, the 2002 Virginia Woolf biopic starring Nicole Kidman, whose costume infamously included a very large, historically questionable sniffer. The movie is one inspiration for Gutierrez’s series Girl Friends (2014), black-andwhite photographs that slip between unidentified time periods while portraying psychologically freighted scenes. “My favorite directors show and don’t tell. They don’t rest on dialogue,” Gutierrez adds, elaborating that Paul Verhoeven’s cultish, high-camp erotic drama Showgirls (1995) and the postmodern road movie Thelma & Louise (1991) have also been important as “soft references.” Gutierrez shows enough to create a mood and particular atmosphere but lets the meanings of her pictures rattle around for viewers. Every detail is meticulously considered, from the silk dress that belonged to her grandmother to each location, but most especially the casting of her mannequins. She seeks out figures that resemble herself to create scenes of disorienting doubling. Finding a mannequin with a sense of individuality is no easy task these days, when most are “perfectly unhuman,” with no individualized face, no gender, and little sense of being modeled on a human with a pulse. The same description might apply to the broader cultural phenomenon of “Instagram face” and new regimes of impossibly smooth AI beauty standards. She finds suitably alive costars by sourcing them from a British company specializing in a bespoke commercial art of the uncanny, creating mannequins that resemble actual people. One of its signature products was modeled on Twiggy, the 1960s ur-waif. The process of making the pictures has posed challenges, requiring guerrilla solutions born of improvisation and, at times, surreal comedy. During the making of Girl Friends (Rosella & Palma 6) (2014), shot on Brown University’s Providence campus, a locked gate required her mother, who was assisting, to feed each prosthetic body part through the metal fence. But once the talent and location are ready, the picture takes on a life of its own. “It’s me and the mannequin,” Gutierrez says. “And how can I make us the uncanny valley of a mirror?” In her photographs, gesture and careful mise-en-scène allude to different registers of connection and intimacy. Are we observing sisters, lovers, old rivals looking to settle a score? The relationships remain ambiguous; no narrative unspools in a subsequent frame to clarify the plot. A menacing figure stares down from the edge of a pool, possibly a nod to La Piscine (1969)—with Jane Birkin cast as an ingénue—and its sultry melding of sea, sex, sun, and murder along the French Riviera. But in Gutierrez’s stylized world-building, geographies are only ever obliquely hinted at, never specified—something Italian, a touch of Americana, or somewhere out of time and space altogether, where a white horse resembling an apparition enters stage left. “A lot of my work exists in science fiction,” Gutierrez says. “I am somewhat science fiction, as an individual. I couldn’t exist in the past.” Science fiction, in this sense, is less a genre than an attitude, a pose, a way of slackening the rules of the visible world. “To my mind cinema and photography are like a brother and sister who are enemies . . . after incest,” the French filmmaker Agnès Varda once wrote about the peculiar relationship between the two mediums. If Gutierrez builds the cinematic,

Luis Baylón captures it on the fly in his medium-format studies of daily life in Spain. If cinema carries us through time, the still photograph suspends it, inviting prolonged observation. Think of the swaggering, swinging ’60s fashion photographer in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), inspired by David Bailey, who enlarges and scrutinizes a photograph’s surface until whatever evidence it might have captured dissolves before him. Baylón, who died in 2023, harnessed the control offered by an isolated frame, working in a tradition of photographers surveying city streets to find order within kaleidoscopic activity, halting motion to attend to details that would otherwise pass unnoticed. The social context of his time made Baylón’s record of individualistic expression and vibrant urban spaces all the more charged. Working in the years of post-Franco Spain, he witnessed how new freedoms energized the streets. The city took on a new tenor. A monograph of his work, Los Españoles (2025), is modeled after Robert Frank’s classic book The Americans (1958).1 Its cover features an elegant, forlorn woman armed with a lit cigarette in each manicured hand. Cigarettes become weapons against existential anxiety, recurring props in the theater of Spanish life. While Frank’s book is a melancholic indictment of the cruel paradoxes and hollow promises of a country he crisscrossed as a foreigner, Baylón, by contrast, offers a less jaundiced view, one teeming with humor and compassion. His figures, mostly appearing on Madrid’s streets in the 1980s through the 2010s, have an unstudied glamour as they go about being Spaniards: exhaling cigarette smoke into tight beams, standing at a bar, exiting a soccer match, queuing for jamones, cramming Nietzsche on break from work. There is a hint of Diane Arbus in his depictions of Madrid’s self-styled characters but also of Arbus’s mentor Lisette Model, known for her at times confrontational portraits and kinetic, ankle-level views of New York pedestrians. Baylón’s formal experimentation and playful vantages are one reason why his work has been described as cinematic, but a sense of motion animates his stillness. Some images allude to narrative: A girl waiting for the metro holding two hula hoops appears to have improbably emerged from the advertisement behind her. Ghostly laundry hung out to dry suggests a scene about to happen, or perhaps just gone by. Life unfolds with a full cast of characters across the social spectrum. Crowds gather and stare in Weegee-esque collective rituals of spectatorship. Nuns, punks, religious processions, and cats, so many cats, bask in geometric blocks of warm light, watching like sentinels from the threshold of a door. Observing Madrid’s streets was second nature for Baylón, and for this he was often likened to a cat. In one self-portrait he cements the association, merging himself with a feline’s black shadow. In a later image made by Baylón in Beijing in 2008, a young boy blows delicate bubbles. This image became the source of a recent painting by Gideon Rubin, who paints from photographic references gleaned from magazines, postcards, casual snapshots, and films. Rubin was drawn to Baylón’s photograph partly because of its anachronism. Made in the aughts, the image has the feel of mid-century humanistic photography. More importantly, the photograph also reminded Rubin of Édouard Manet’s Boy Blowing Bubbles (1867), featuring a child lost in quiet concentration as he magically creates a delicate orb from his own

breath. Rubin had once repainted a faceless version of this work on a small piece of cardboard, and the connection speaks to his early commitment to a tradition of painting rooted in direct observation and working from life. At the time, he deliberately eschewed photographic references, even though the artists he admired, such as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, had made photographs central to their art. He credits them, instead, with teaching him to appreciate the poetic qualities of brushstroke. It wasn’t until Rubin encountered a Victorian family album at a shop in Hampstead, England, that he saw the possibilities of bringing photography into his own work. The album he found, now yellowed and grainy, its details bleached by sunlight, was intriguing for its patina and distortions—it lent the figures anonymity, allowing Rubin to project his own connections, memories, and associations. It was only later, prompted by a friend, that he began to connect the album to the loss of his own family—and to the photographs that remained as traces of their existence—during the Holocaust. Anonymity would become a hallmark for him. The first thing one notices about Rubin’s work is that his figures have no faces, only blank ovals devoid of the features that distinguish individual identity and convey emotion. This erasure creates an eerie effect, a sci-fi dreamscape where the clothes and environs are tidy and as expected, but the people are vacant and impenetrable. He works quickly, making most paintings within a day, using muted tones to describe in gradual movements of shadow and light. “I hate fiddling,” he says. “I want directness and to translate something of the world into a brushstroke.” The photographic source has already abstracted a reality, and then Rubin further estranges things by withholding expression through an anti-close-up. Roland Barthes, writing about Greta Garbo in the 1950s, observed how the human face “still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy” and “represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh.” If Rubin resists the face becoming an image, Gutierrez and her mannequins appear always at the ready for their close-up, fully leaning into the idea of the face as an event, one that can captivate or equally disorient. Baylón parses the flow of city life to register the faces that constitute an otherwise anonymous collective. With their silences and stillness, all three are content to show more than they tell, introducing us to strangers that we recognize nevertheless.

1—The Americans was first published in France by Delpire & Co., before being released in the United States. Baylón’s book is also published by Delpire & Co. and was released after Baylón died in 2023.

Gideon Rubin KIMONO, 2026 Martine Gutierrez GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 6), 2014 GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 3), 2014

Martine Gutierrez GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 1), 2014

Gideon Rubin RED KNICKERS, 2026 CAT, 2026

Martine Gutierrez BODY EN THRALL, BLONDE BED, 2020

Gideon Rubin ON THE SOFA, 2026

Martine Gutierrez GIRL FRIENDS (ANITA & MARIE 2), 2014 GIRL FRIENDS (TESS & NOMI 7), 2014

Gideon Rubin RED BIKINI, 2026

Gideon Rubin BIRD, 2026 UNTITLED, 2026

Martine Gutierrez GIRL FRIENDS (ANITA & MARIE 5), 2014

Gideon Rubin YELLOW KIMONO, 2026

Martine Gutierrez BODY EN THRALL, BLONDE SHOE, 2020

LUIS BAYLÓN

GIDEON RUBIN

MARTINE GUTIERREZ

RAYITO DEL SOL, 1995

BIRD, 2025 Oil on linen 39 ⅜ × 35 7/16 inches (100 × 90 cm)

GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 6), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP

PEKÍN NIÑO POMPAS, 2016 PAREJA METRO BESO, n.d. EL DIAMANTE, 2004 PAMELA, 2003 ÉXITO SIN PRECEDENTES, 2000 PEKÍN ZAPATOS LAZO, 2016 UN VICIO, 1987 LA DOÑA NO FUMA SOLA, 1999

BUBBLES, 2026 Oil on linen 35 7/16 × 31 ½ inches (90 × 80 cm) WHITE ROSE, 2026 Oil on linen mounted on board 9 ⅞ × 7 ⅞ inches (25 × 20 cm) UNTITLED, 2025 Oil on linen 19 ⅞ × 17 ⅞ inches (50.5 × 45.5 cm) HANDBAG, 2026 Oil on linen 35 7/16 × 35 7/16 inches (90 × 90 cm) WHITE BRA, 2025 Oil on board 8 1/16 × 8 1/16 inches (20.5 × 20.5 cm) UNTITLED, 2026 Oil on linen 39 ⅜ × 35 ⅜ inches (100 × 90 cm) KIMONO, 2026 Oil on linen 33 7/16 × 25 ⅝ inches (85 × 65 cm) RED KNICKERS, 2026 Oil on linen mounted on board 11 13/16 × 9 ⅞ inches (30 × 25 cm) ON THE SOFA, 2026 Oil on linen mounted on board 11 13/16 × 15 ¾ inches (30 × 40 cm) CAT, 2026 Oil on linen 11 ⅞ × 10 inches (30 × 25.4 cm) RED BIKINI, 2026 Oil on linen mounted on board 12 × 19 11/16 inches (30.5 × 50 cm) BIRD, 2026 Oil on linen 10 × 8 inches (25.5 × 20 cm) UNTITLED, 2026 Oil on linen mounted on board 9 ⅞ × 7 ⅞ inches (25 × 20 cm)

YELLOW KIMONO, 2026 Oil on linen 39 ⅜ × 35 7/16 inches (100 × 90 cm)

GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 3), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP GIRL FRIENDS (ROSELLA & PALMA 1), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP BODY EN THRALL, BLONDE BED, 2020 C-print mounted on Dibond 40 × 60 inches (101.6 × 152.4 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP GIRL FRIENDS (ANITA & MARIE 2), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP GIRL FRIENDS (TESS & NOMI 7), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP GIRL FRIENDS (ANITA & MARIE 5), 2014 Archival inkjet print mounted on Dibond 9 × 13 ½ inches (22.9 × 34.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP BODY EN THRALL, BLONDE SHOE, 2020 C-print mounted on Dibond 48 × 32 inches (121.9 × 81.3 cm) Edition of 8, plus 2 AP

Published on the occasion of the exhibition CINÉMATIQUE OCTOBER 29—DECEMBER 23, 2026 RYAN LEE GALLERY 515 WEST 26TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10011 212-397-0742 WWW.RYANLEEGALLERY.COM Catalogue manager ISABELLA VITTI Essay MICHAEL FAMIGHETTI Design OMNIVORE Publication copyright © 2026 RYAN LEE GALLERY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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