D for Defense #24

(by Bleyer)
 

The true conoisseurs of Rob’s work have to surrender completely to this image, because where a normal reader would see a simple character presentation panel, an educated viewer can see a social revindication of great value. A sign more of Rob!’s supernatural inteligence, he is capable of transforming what the script sees as an ordinary panel into a fierce argument about woman’s place in society.

Look at the image. You can see a woman with skeletal arms, that indicate her fragility, brutally corseted in a dress that limits, pressures and suffocates her, as you can deduce by the curved lines that Rob! ilustrates the indumentary. The dress represents, with precision worthy of the most simbolic of metaphors, the castrating role that society exerts over women. That’s the reason the dress is pink, the same reason why it pressures the woman’s body until it looks like it is reaching agony. The seemingly relaxed pose of the woman is an alegory about the sumision which they have, traditionaly, accepted this social pressure, but if you dig a little deeper it gives you a glimse of their true pain of womankind, their suffering of being forced to an irreal cliche. Rob! allows us to see this misery, for example in the posture of the legs, tensely crossed til anatomic impossibility, which contrasts with the happiness that the lady’s smile radiates. Ostensible submission, with inner pain. Likewise, the feet’s pose is another indicator of the torment that women are inadvertently submitted, because Rob!’s woman archetype walks using the tip of their feet, a kind a behaviour known to be specially hurtfull that with time causes terrible malformations in the lower extremities. Look at the position of her right hand’s fingers, clearly twisted in pain, another example of the dicothomy that Rob! tries to ilustrate with this excelent drawing: apparent happiness, inner pain.

The Woman, I write this with caps because I am talking about the Woman as a concept, is submitted to this torture and clearly trapped in the limbo that is having to accept the already discussed constraining role or reject it and start the fight. Lost between social aceptance or revolution, confused, as Rob! shows us with precision making her portrait reach out with her right hand to a non-existent support, looking for a security that isn’t there.

But Rob! also gives us a glimpse of hope. Through this opressing pink dress, jail which the colective social subconscious traps the Woman, it can be appreaciated with all clarity the lines of the femenine body. Rob! wants us to remember that, underneath of what society sees, under the apparent happiness of the slave Woman you can find, in all it’s beauty, in all it’s greatness, the pure Woman waiting to explosively free herself from this pink jail. A calling that Rob! does to all the world’s women to fly, free and beautifull, to their full realization.

And seeing this work of art, the men from Progressive Boink just say that Rob! marks the vagina’s lines (confusing vagina with groin) and that her legs are backwards… They are just ignorants that confuse art with swill
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