de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Hellbent For, a new exhibition by James Gobel, an artist whose meticulously crafted works have long expanded the possibilities of queer material culture. This exhibition situates Gobel’s latest paintings within a broader conversation on domestic aesthetics, coded visibility, and the generative intimacy of queer communal experience.

Gobel’s new works mark a decisive evolution in his practice. Moving beyond the mosaic felt and paper-cutting techniques that have defined his earlier oeuvre, using Flashe paint to construct calibrated fields of color that reveal shifting patterns, textures, and passages of embroidered linework. These stitch like contours, deliberate and often playful, create surfaces that hover between the ornamental and the architectural. The paintings unfold as ornate domestic tableaux, at once tender, the paintings soften the aspirational aesthetics of home décor while gently parodying its decorative ambitions. 

The intimate infrastructures of queer life, its private jokes, its covert signals, and its chosen iconographies all surface subtly across the works. Embedded in Gobel’s compositions are buried linear passages: signatures, forthcoming dates, and personal or cultural emblems. One painting conceals the letters “JP”, a nod to the Judas Priest logo that, for the artist, bridges childhood memory with the queer resonance later revealed through Rob Halford’s public identity. In tracing this lineage, Gobel honors narratives that shape both the self and the communities he inhabits. His paintings join a long and vital tradition of queer storytelling in which making becomes an act of preservation, resistance, and future-building.

The paintings function like small theaters, each one a stage where memory, desire, and coded communication converge. Across the canvases, patterns, decorative objects, wry pastoral references, curling plumes of smoke, and the sentimental presence of pets and keepsakes populate the stage-like picture plane. These objects—seemingly whimsical, and often humorous, serve as quiet witnesses to daily life. Gobel imbues them with emotional charge, acknowledging how the things we collect and live among bear our stories and become extensions of our interior worlds.