Andrej Dubravsky

Interview by
Evan Moffitt
Photography by
Albert Vrzgula & Bence Keszegh

SLOVAKIAN PAINTER RAISES BIG COCKS, LOVES BIG MEN

Andrej Dubravsky likes it big. The Slovakian stud wines and dines his full-bodied lovers at his farm where, he says, you can plant any seed and it will grow. Recently, his sexy paintings of big guys getting it on pissed off the right-wing, fat-shaming Slovakian Minister of Culture, so he's doubled down and scaled them up. We caught him after a long, sweaty day of work in the garden, where he was busy feeding his cocks and hens.

Evan Moffitt: Hey, Andrej. How are you? 
Andrej Dubravksy: Good…it’s just been crazy hectic! 
Are you working on a new show? 
No, there’s just always work to do in the garden, around the house. My next show opens at the end of the year so I have time to garden before I start painting again.
You’re home in Slovakia, right? What is it like where you are right now?
Right now, I’m standing in front of my veranda. I’m looking at my beautiful cactus collection (laughs). And I picked the cherries in the back of my garden. I put them in a little bowl, and I wanted to eat them, but then I decided to call you, so I probably shouldn’t eat them and talk to you at the same time…
Oh, go ahead! (rooster crows) Was that a cock crowing just now? 
Yeah. He should sleep, it’s late for him. My house is in the southwest of Slovakia. It’s a very warm area and it has the best soil in Central Europe.
Really? Hot.
A very, very prolific, dark soil. When you Google this village, that’s what you can read. And it’s so true, because everything you put in the soil grows like crazy. I planted more than a hundred trees around here and in my garden. 
I wanted to ask you about your most recent nude paintings, which are being exhibited in the Czech Republic. Did you paint them from life? 
Actually, no. It would be great but I actually never paint a model live. I usually take photos of the big guys I fuck, but they’re not very useful for painting. You know, when I’m having sex with someone, I just focus on sex or I focus on the person. And then when I do art, I just focus on the art, you know? But then sometimes they say, ‘Hey, you should paint me, can I be your model?’ But it can get complicated. Because they’ll be like, ‘Oh, it doesn’t look like me…’ I don’t wanna have this conversation. 
Fair. So is the guy on the swing in your paintings is like, some dream daddy, then? 
Those are based on Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ‘The Swing,’ a very horny painting from the 18th century. But actually, they don’t have to be daddies. I also paint teenagers. It’s more about them being bigger than being older. Recently, I’m fucking only, like, chubby guys in their twenties. I don’t really know how this happened. (laughs) 
Cute! 
I don’t try to chase them or anything. They just keep calling. I always felt like someone who likes older guys, but I just realized that, wow, it’s actually not true. 
Well, the word got out and now they’re telling all their friends. 
Please tell your friends! (laughs) But really, it’s kind of fascinating for me to have conversations with people who are young, like teenagers or in their twenties. I think older, bigger guys have experienced all kinds of things in their lives already –frustrations and disappointments. I feel like younger guys may know better nowadays that they can be attractive for someone. So, they feel a little more comfortable. 

01/04

Progress. 
Yes, maybe. To answer your question, the guy on the swing is basically a symbol of all the chubby guys I’ve met. It’s like the essence of them.
The essence of chub. I love that. 
Yes. 
Where is your favorite place to meet guys?
Uh, physical place or online platform? 
Either.
I love to visit different places. I love to see how people live. But when you are meeting younger guys, they often live with their parents, especially in Slovakia, so you have to meet them at your place. And I often feel kind of lonely at my house. My boyfriends only visit me here once a week, or they come for a weekend. Most days I’m here by myself with my cats and my chickens. When I have a sexy visitor, I feel like this whole garden and house makes sense.
That’s very romantic. 
I just like to put a nice cloth on the table in the garden, and serve them something like bananas with chocolate, a nice tea or coffee, you know? And then, I’m sitting with this sexy date and I’m looking around and I’m like, wow, my garden is actually so beautiful. And I just feel so good here. So, I would say I love to meet guys in my house. When someone travels a long way to come here it’s never just sex and then ‘bye.’ At the end, they leave happy with a dozen eggs from my hens, or zucchini from the garden…
I’ll bet! Let’s rewind for a second…earlier, did you say boyfriends, plural? 
Yeah, yeah, yeah… (laughs) 
Okay. What’s the tea? 
So I have one boyfriend for 13 plus years, and, and then I have a second boyfriend for four years.  nice.
Is it like a throuple or like a polyamorous situation?
It’s not romantic between them. I mean, they met a couple times, but they don’t want to spend time together, which kind of sucks. I would love to organize one birthday party or New Year’s Eve together with both of them, but the older one doesn’t wanna socialize with the younger one. But it’s okay. The one whom I’m with for 13 years is 52, and then the newer one is 25. So, they both bring something very different. Of course, I love to meet new people for sex, but I just tend to cultivate friendships or relationships and not one-night stands. When I like someone, I’m immediately like, ‘Hey, let’s go for a little swim. Let’s stay here and cook dinner.’ You know? 
Have you always been that way? Or is it more recent?
I have always been this way. I think it’s kind of normal in Slovakia. In New York, people are shocked when you fuck them and then you want to come visit them again, and then you want to do some activities together. They’re like, ‘Oh, you’re different. You’re not just objectifying me for my fat belly, and then you’re gonna leave and never call.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, am I really not objectifying you?’ (laughs) I do a little bit of course, but only if I actually like them. 
You’re there to make them dinner, fuck them, and then stick around for dessert. The full menu. 
Yeah!
What’s the best thing about being with a bigger guy?
Uh, it’s hard to say. My penis goes hard when I touch someone like this, someone bigger. 
Do you like the feeling of a bigger body on top of you? Like the feeling of being smothered?
Actually, no. I don’t have any of these kinds of fetishes. But you know, I get asked why I’m into bigger guys all the time, and it’s kind of strange to hear. Someone who is into skinny, shredded or muscly guys would never get asked the same thing. It’s seen as normal. I’m not complaining. Even bigger guys are surprised. They ask me the same questions. I’m like, ‘Dude, it’s normal.’ You know? You are attractive for someone. That should be enough, no? 
Yeah, totally. 

01/07

But I can tell you something like my ‘bear coming out’…
Please!
I had my first boyfriend when I was 16 years old. He was 20 years older than me. He was actually my age now, which is crazy! He wasn’t really fat or anything, but he had a little bit of muscles, a little bit of belly. And towards the end of this relationship, I tried to do stuff with the other guys, like young and skinny guys, and my penis wouldn’t get hard. I had just gone through coming out, I had been with girls, and now I realize my penis is not hard when I’m with other guys my age with my body type. I thought there was something wrong with me. Like, what if I’m into something worse? Like what if I’m into dogs? 
Woof. 
And then I went to Barcelona with this first boyfriend, and we were dancing in a typical gay club. I was maybe, 18, 19 years old. Everybody’s sweaty and horny and kissing, but I wasn’t really feeling it. And then some older, chubby guy came to me and we started to dance together, and my penis was immediately so hard and just like, so wet. It was like, soaking through my pants. I was touching his face. I remember it was so warm and dry from his facial hair. His chubby cheeks felt so good. And then we were kissing and dancing, and it was a totally different universe, and it was beautiful. 
He took your bear virginity? 
We didn’t do anything except dancing and kissing, but the realization of it still felt like my second coming out, you know. 
I love that. 
Me too! I’m happy that I’m not into dogs. 
Well, yes, thank God. It seems like you’re surrounded by animals all the time, so that might be, uh, a lot of temptation.
I love animals, but not that way. 
There were a lot of animals – and boys – in the last show of yours I saw in New York. There’s a very wet, natural, outdoor feeling to the paintings. 
I paint with acrylic on canvas. I often paint outside in the garden, and then I spray the paintings with the garden hose. I used to paint bodies in nature but now it’s really just about the body, not too much of a story or anything. The body is the story. 
It has so much to tell.. 
Yeah. I Google a lot and then I do some sketches, sometimes in Photoshop. When I first tried to find images of big guys to paint, I browsed these very strange blogs about gaining and feeders. I’m not really attracted to this whole subculture, but it’s very interesting to research. 

01/06
When I saw that stupid people are so disgusted and so shocked that like, a fat person can be attractive for someone, I thought okay, I wanna work with this theme and I wanna make it big and I wanna enjoy it.

How have your paintings been received in the Czech Republic? 
The guy who runs the museum asked me to paint whatever I wouldn’t show in a private gallery. So I thought, like, three meters big paintings of chubby guys would maybe not sell so easily to gay living rooms, you know what I mean? So I did it, and everybody loved it. And there are even some in gay living rooms now… (laughs) 
Go off! 
But there was this whole drama with the government in Slovakia. In December I gave some paintings for a group show here. I’m good friends with the curator. There was a little bit of everything, a landscape, a ladybug, and one sexy painting where a skinny guy is kissing a chubby guy. But we have this horrible new government in Slovakia, and the new Minister of Culture is this really dumb woman who somehow saw my painting there, put it on her Facebook and Instagram and said it was totally immoral and horrible and disgusting, ‘children could see it’. And they wanted to shut down the exhibition because of my painting! 
Fuck! That’s awful. 
They’ve kicked out a lot of people working in the museums in Slovakia, which is really, really horrible. And they’ve tried to censor everything. We were protesting every day for three months. This one particular painting of mine became a symbol of the whole situation. All the newspapers and TV shows were calling me. And I’m like, you know, let me chill! One newspaper put the painting on their front page, so now I’m locally mega famous. (laughs) 
No press is bad press, I guess… 
But then I started to read the comments on the internet, and I saw that people are actually not so disgusted by the fact that these are two men kissing. What they hated was that one of them is fat. Which was really shocking to me! I got a lot of hateful messages. But it made me rethink this show which I opened in Czech Republic. When I saw that stupid people are so disgusted and so shocked that like, a fat person can be attractive for someone, I thought okay, I wanna work with this theme and I wanna make it big and I wanna enjoy it. 
Do you feel like it’s given your practice a new sense of purpose? You’re depicting bodies that aren’t very well represented in the history of art. 
Or in pop culture. Lately in art fairs and in the galleries we see paintings of skinny guys and twinks having sex, and it’s kind of comfortable for everyone, even for older audiences. Like, that’s how we like our gays – young and sporty. In Slovakia – and I’m saying this humbly – I am a little bit a part of the pop culture in this shitty, small country. So I feel a bit responsible for changing the dynamic. Of course, there are artists like Lucian Freud, his best paintings were of chubby people. There’s Jenny Saville, there’s Rubens. But I’m trying to paint them in a different way, I think. 
Now that the drama has died down a bit, do you have any fun plans to escape this summer? 
Oh, yes! This Thursday I go to Croatia. To my favorite place ever on the planet. It’s actually this swinger beach. It’s mostly straight Germans, Austrians, Italians, Czechs and Slovaks having sex on the beach. It’s like a nudist beach, but then you always have like three or four pairs of people fucking. I really love that atmosphere. When you go a little bit further, you have the best gay beach ever existing, which is also very sexy but very relaxed. No Mykonos types of gays, just very chill gays with dogs. Mostly former Yugoslavian people, Czechs, Slovaks, Italians, etc. 
Sounds divine. 
I mean, nobody looks very perfect there. It’s not very comfortable. The rocks are kind of sharp. There are no sun beds and there’s no long drinks bar or anything like this. So I would say it attracts the right people for me. You have the sunset and the dolphins are jumping and then you are getting blowjobs on the rocks and you have your little JBL speaker playing some silly music… (laughs) I’m super excited. 
Oh, I’m jealous! I hope you see lots of…dolphins. 

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Published on 02 July 2024