Gerardo Rosales: El Bosque

July 12 - August 23, 2025

Gerardo Rosales: El Bosque
July 12 - August 23, 2025

Laura (the gallery)
1125 E 11th St, Houston, TX

Laura (the gallery) is pleased to present El Bosque, a solo exhibition by Houston-based, Venezuelan-born artist Gerardo Rosales, on view from July 12 through August 23, 2025.

In El Bosque, Gerardo Rosales conjures a mythic woodland alive with eyes, limbs, foliage, and desire—a pictorial ecosystem where the human merges with the vegetal and the animal in acts of metamorphosis and survival. These works are not just depictions of nature but meditations on becoming: on the queer necessity of shapeshifting, of vanishing into the landscape to be seen, to desire, to exist.

The works are lushly adorned, brimming with pattern and color that call upon Latin American folk aesthetics, Catholic iconography, and Gio Ponti’s modernist ornamentation. Yet beneath the saturated surfaces, a quiet code operates. Queerness here is ornamental not to dazzle but to shield; not decorative but tactical. Each motif (a snake, a hybrid beast, a humanoid figure mid-transformation) signals a refusal of fixed identity and a survival strategy to deflect erasure.

The lush forests of Rosales’s paintings are cruising grounds. Not in the euphemistic or romantic sense, but in the historical, coded, and clandestine one: a geography of furtive encounters, glances exchanged under cover of trees, paths walked in circles so as not to be caught. In the titular painting El Bosque (Shedding Skin), looping lines mimic the winding rituals of cruising in places like Central Park’s Ramble, the geometry of longing traced under threat. Figures dissolve into flora, bodies split into animal forms, eyes multiply. There is no linearity, only choreography: evasion, emergence, camouflage. As José Esteban Muñoz, author of Cruising Utopia, writes, queerness “is not yet here.” It glimmers on the horizon, in the underbrush, in the anonymous touch of a stranger.

Floating within and around these forests are Rosales’s cut-out aluminum forms, painted hybrids suspended in space, refusing containment. A red snake slithers across the wall, shedding and shifting; a smaller yellow serpent flickers at its edge like a trail marker or warning. Two “drones” hover ambiguously between insect, mushroom, alien, and sentient slime…figures of unknowable origin and queer futurity. Their presence echoes the ecological crossings and strange kinships that occur in the margins.

At the center of this suspended bestiary is the Coyote, a creature painted in the palette of Maze, galloping toward Coyote in a Pearl Cage, where its silhouette is echoed and reframed. Suspended above the two works, the coyote becomes a bridge, literally and symbolically. Its placement recalls a wildlife overpass: one of the engineered land bridges that allow animals to migrate safely across highways and other human interventions. Here, the coyote’s migration evokes not only animal movement but queer passage across spaces of danger and exposure, toward moments of sanctuary, camouflage, or ecstatic encounter.

Rosales, who came of age in Caracas and later earned his MFA at Chelsea College of Art in London, has long worked between visibility and opacity, beauty and critique. Over decades as both artist and educator, he has developed a practice rooted in queer epistemologies, ways of knowing through concealment, feeling, and intuition. In Coyote in a Pearl Cage, a luminous outline encases the animal form like a spell or snare, recalling the simultaneous vulnerability and power of embodiment.

Maze further distills this ethos: guardian-like silhouettes shimmer with botanical patterns and disembodied eyes, standing sentinel in the imagined forest. They watch, are watched, and bear witness to the rituals that must occur in the shadows.

In El Bosque, the forest is not simply a setting. It is an archive of survival, a place where nature and the self blur, where solitude is both exile and communion. Rosales offers us a vision of becoming that is not fixed but forever unfurling, like vines across a hidden path.

For inquiries or additional materials, please contact info@laurathegallery.com.

About the artist

Gerardo Rosales (b. Venezuela, lives and works in Houston, TX) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice probes the entanglements of race, class, gender, and sexuality through a vernacular that is at once subversively playful and incisively critical. Working across painting, installation, and mixed media, Rosales draws from the visual tropes of folk art, religious iconography, and decorative craft to stage uneasy collisions between domestic familiarity and sociopolitical tension. A self-taught artist prior to formal training at the Instituto Universitario de Estudios Superiores de Artes Plásticas Armando Reverón in Caracas, Rosales later completed his MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His work has been presented at key institutions across Latin America and the United States, including Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas Sofía Ímber, Museo Jacobo Borges, CAMH Houston, The Moody Center, The Blaffer, and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Maracay Mario Abreu. His work resides in significant public and private collections, including the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, the McNay Art Museum, the Bank of Venezuela, the Transart Foundation, the Houston Botanic Garden, and the Houston Endowment. For over two decades, Rosales also sustained a parallel career in arts education, shaping generations of students while refining a personal practice grounded in pedagogy, cultural critique, and queer epistemology. His imagery—often vibrantly saturated and seductively ornamental—operates as both camouflage and code, inviting viewers into a world where the aesthetics of joy and beauty disarm while laying bare deeper structures of power, marginalization, and resistance.