Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to present Things I Would Like to Say But Don't Know How, the first exhibition in Brazil by the Dutch artist Gerben Mulder. Parallel to the show of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that will be shown in Galeria 1, Mulder's paintings will be in Galeria 2.

This Dutch artist, resident in New York, has developed a kind of figurative painting with an alarming effect. His paintings portray disturbing creatures with anthropomorphic bodies, eyes purple or swollen or deliriously open, which seem to live on the dark margin of human experiences. Between the human and the fantastic, the portrait and the cartoon, the adult and the child, these characters allude to perverse, not at all playful notions from a certain childhood that unfolds in the present.

In painting these imaginary portraits, Mulder uses a shallow palette, with many colors in pastel tones, establishing a contrast between a painting's luminosity and its dark narrative. In the five paintings in this exhibition, Mulder seems to want to release to the surface (as he says himself in the exhibition's title), the oneiric psyche that operates inside, where the setting reflects an ironic optimism while each character translates into a dose of social dysfunction and a painful, deformed eroticism.

Last year Mulder received the discovery prize of the Dutch government's Royal Foundation for the Visual Arts. This year, in addition to showing in Brazil, he will have a solo show in the Michael Janssen Gallery in Cologne, Germany.