TO BE A gay artist like Paul P., a painter who became known in the early 2000s New York art world as part of a set of young artists revitalizing the then-unfashionable form of portraiture, is to live and work within two timelines simultaneously. There’s the timeline of art history, long enough to be measured in epochs and eras and movements, and the one of openly expressive gay culture, which is so furiously compressed that, since the 1969 Stonewall uprising, it has essentially shed its skin and become something new every five years or so. The first history can be found in museums and textbooks; the second, until recently, had been preserved only when someone was prescient enough to know that what others might dismiss as disreputable, disposable or degraded was worth retrieving and archiving. The bewitching quality of Paul P.’s portraits is that their creator, a serious, studious and engaging Canadian, is aesthetically bilingual. He can speak about his indebtedness to the tradition of artists like John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, but also about the decades of research hours he’s put in at Toronto’s Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives — now called the ArQuives — from which he’s sourced the subjects of his paintings, poring over images of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS magazine and gay-porn erotica for the face, the look, the come-on, the sulk or the mood that might inspire his next work.
“I’m an appropriationist,” he says when we meet in July at the New York gallery Greene Naftali, where he is preparing to have his first solo show in Chelsea in almost 15 years. “I mostly say that because, in a lot of representational figurative work, [what you see] is usually the artist’s circle of lovers, friends, models. In that way I’m very different. … I’m looking at magazines or printouts and redoing that activity over and over, and that’s how I underscore the importance I feel that those [archival] works have.” The period he explores is a window of only about a dozen years, full of lost boys — literally, since it’s almost impossible to know who they were, who survived and who succumbed, who was gay, who was straight, who was just trying to make enough money to get by. His art fuses both types of history — high and low, revered and discounted.
The young men we see in Paul P.’s portraits are, at first glance and at second, hard to pin down. They look immediate, present, of this moment, but they also seem almost spectral, perhaps from another world or a different reality. Their gaze is challenging, even posturing or seductive, but also vulnerable and open — that is, when we can see their eyes at all; sometimes, they’re downcast or turned just far enough away from us to make us uncertain whether they’re refusing to look back at us or simply unaware that we’re staring at them. Their attitude feels frankly erotic, even though we mostly see them only from the waist or the midchest up. They’re often presented against backgrounds pregnant with rich, implicative color, as if they were posing against storm clouds, but storm clouds that can change hue like mood rings to reflect the inner turbulence of those who stand among them. Occasionally they seem enshrouded in a kind of charged or narcotized haze. They appear suffused with desire, but it’s not clear whether the desire is theirs or ours.
They also evoke a sense of foreboding. His work is not AIDS art, but it is art that’s deeply informed by a feeling that the sensual is bound up with the ever-present possibilities of risk, hazard and illness. “I can’t claim any kind of nostalgia for that [1970s] period at all,” says Paul P., who is 47. “Because I have no firsthand knowledge of it — the before times, the halcyon days. I come from a very particular microgeneration, that of queer people whose sexual development occurred almost in lock step with the visible ravages of the AIDS crisis.”
“Microgeneration” is accurate. A gay man who was, like Paul P., born in 1977 has a particular relationship to the pandemic that isn’t shared by those a few years older or younger. He was raised from middle-school age on to understand AIDS as a terrifying and invariably fatal scourge. And although it was becoming a chronic but not terminal illness by the time he reached adulthood in the late 1990s, that moment was still new enough that many believed it was a false hope. He was part of the Doom Generation, to use the filmmaker Gregg Araki’s term. “It was a period of fear and misinformation and real tragedy,” Paul P. says. “I was not part of the generation that was decimated or ensnared in the first wave of chaos. But at that stage of life, when you were willing to step into this great unknown scary coming out, it was just sort of assumed that to be gay and to have to die of AIDS were connected.” What he felt, he recalls, was “sort of a tacit acceptance, almost like a wager with death. And as I looked at history more, I realized that this is something everlasting. It has always been a part of gay life.”
Paul P. — he began using the “P.” to abbreviate his last name in his first year of art school, and it stuck — is especially good at finding the connections between different eras of gay or gay-adjacent culture. He can toggle between centuries and continents and modes gracefully, between queer liberation and the dandyishness of a century ago, the presentational self-costuming of young men and the consciously overdone too-muchness of their interior spaces (think of the early chapters of “Brideshead Revisited” or of the Bright Young Things of the 1920s).
But his aesthetic — like those of all queer artists — is also shaped to a degree by the particular moment at which he came of age. His return this fall is timely, not just because his mode of painting seems to have come back into style but also because the generation he represents has been routinely glossed over. It’s tempting to look at artists of Paul P.’s age and imagine that they’re, in a way, postcatastrophic. It’s true that they didn’t lose their peers or lovers or friends or colleagues with the same terrifying rapidity that gay men who were 15 or 20 years older did. But it would be a mistake to imagine that they — or, of course, their art — are thus defined by optimism or blitheness. A sense of visiting, and of trying to comprehend and share, something that was evanescent and doomed — even those eras before queer sex was intertwined with disease and death were imbued with impermanence — is a signal feature of his art. His adolescence, he says, “left an indelible mark on me in terms of the way in which I was able to metabolize deadly consequences alongside my own hormonal impulses at that age.” It was a time in which, if you were a gay man, the world suddenly seemed wide open to you — and in peril of ending at any second.
When Paul P. first came to New York, many of the gay artists who might have served as inspirations — or even as part of an establishment that young upstarts could measure themselves against and challenge — were already, prematurely, gone. He arrived in a city in which David Wojnarowicz, Félix Gonzáles-Torres and Martin Wong were martyrs and memories rather than the formidable presences that they might otherwise have been. He was in his early 20s; it was little more than a year after Sept. 11, and there was a feeling that much of New York culture, including parts of the art world, was starting again from scratch. It was, among many other things, a moment of opportunity for artists. AIDS was survivable, Sept. 11 had not destroyed the city’s spirit and, in Chelsea, where some side-street storefront rents were still manageable, pocket galleries were beginning to find a modicum of success.
“I was very fortunate in terms of things just lining up for me,” he says. A couple of phone calls made by friends got him a meeting with Daniel Reich, an aspiring gallerist a few years older than he was. “I was sent over with a cache of drawings that had just developed to a point where something like my style was suddenly there, and they were ready to be seen.” Reich, an eccentric who was painstaking about things like his intellectually precise press releases but was also willing to act quickly on his hunches, took to Paul P. and his work instantly and put it on the walls of his gallery — which also happened to be his shoebox-size Chelsea apartment. He would roll up his mattress and put it in his bathtub to make more space. “It was tiny,” Paul P. says. “But everyone came through.”
Theirs was an ideal professional partnership. Because the two were so close in age, Reich immediately understood what Paul P. was after in his early work. “Daniel could almost anticipate what I wanted to do before I did it,” the artist says. “He would sometimes struggle to try to push me in those directions, maybe a little too abruptly. There were daily phone calls. The conversation never ended with him.”
Paul P.’s fortunes rose with Reich’s, and Reich’s rose with Chelsea’s as the neighborhood reconstituted itself as the art hub of Manhattan in the mid-aughts. Soon after they met, Reich was able to rent an actual gallery on West 23rd Street where he could showcase a handful of youthful, talented artists who were happy to have a champion, even one who would sometimes disappear unexpectedly for days at a time.
Was the growth too fast, too heedless? By 2006, The Times’s art critic Roberta Smith was writing about the commodification of art in Chelsea and expressing the need for the art community “to reassert art as a process and a mind-set rather than a product.” Gay art and activism were changing just as rapidly. A decade earlier, with the arrival of new H.I.V. medications, the focus had been on a sudden ray of sunlight — after 15 years of the news getting worse and worse. Now it was more about striding forward. The marriage equality fight and anti-discrimination legislation dominated the headlines. And the gay community struggled with intragroup quarrels about mainstream acceptance versus the need to preserve an outlaw quality to L.G.B.T.Q. life that many still cherished.
It was time for a reset. With his partner, the Canadian artist Scott Treleaven, 52 (the pair have been together since 2001), Paul P. moved to Paris. “He grew up in the same part of the world as I did,” he says of Treleaven. “We’ve always been a cloistered society of two.” For Paul P., the relocation was transformative, but in a gradual, cumulative way. “I don’t move quickly in my thinking,” he says. But Paris “changed my way of looking, my interest in environmental coloration — all of these natural effects that I picked up in landscape that then affected the way that I image my portraits.”
They returned to New York when Chelsea was hotter, competition for artists and eyeballs and patrons stiffer, rents more and more impossible. And then, with the financial crisis of 2008, the bubble burst, as bubbles always must.
“That was uniquely hard on galleries, particularly Daniel’s,” he says. “It was the end of an interestingly bracketed period for art getting [new] voices out there, for smaller galleries existing next to bigger ones. And it really marked the end for him.” A style of painting antithetical to Paul P.’s was overtaking gallery walls — abstract, decorative canvases so lacking in a historical or theoretical point of view that critics eventually lumped them into a new movement pejoratively termed zombie formalism. (Collectors, for a time at least, were undeterred by the term.) Reich held on to the space he had rented as long as he could but finally lost it in 2011, along with his foothold in a scene that had become about deep-pocketed investors who saw art as a new type of futures market. At the end of 2012, he took his own life at 39. Most people, including many who had been close to him a few years earlier, didn’t learn of his death until more than three months after it had happened.
PAUL P. DIDN’T retreat, but the New York that had chewed up and discarded his patron wasn’t the New York that he had arrived in almost a decade earlier. Always attracted to the combination of toughness and fragility in gay men, their determination to make a mark despite their knowledge that much of the world would gladly blot them out, he had now witnessed it firsthand. He still showed in New York intermittently, but without a home base gallery, and with a sense that the landscape had altered.
To be a gay artist is often to consider oneself an elegist — a chronicler of loss, whether of people or of styles or of ways of life you spend time chasing down to try to understand before the memory of them vanishes. It’s why over the past decade, Paul P., who now mostly lives in Toronto, also found himself drawn to Venice — actually to two Venices, the one in Italy (especially its history as an enclave for dandies in the late Victorian era) and the other on the California coast (the source for a good deal of the early gay porn that still fascinates him). “Once I located this period of provisional freedoms in the ’70s, it made me want to look at other instances of that,” he says. The Venices, for him, represented mirror-image “places of exile or self-exile. They were the edges of the world, in a way, for North American or European consciousness,” he says. He started to explore their touch points of loucheness, freedom and sexuality, drawn to what felt like a frontier to him, a land that exists “as far as subcultures can be pushed before falling into the ocean.”
“Suddenly I was looking at things outside of just the magazines that I’ve always looked at,” he says. “And the motifs I started to focus on were things like light on stucco walls, hanging laundry and the shadows that those things create. It opened up a whole new avenue for painting for me, which in some ways could be seen as a departure. But I also considered it a continuation of my looking at the erotic elements of a time period, and life in the shadows, the denouement of both the porn star hustler and the European aristocrat in these places of escape.”
He’s acutely conscious that both sets of men were, in different ways, “doomed to defeat.” The young men in Venice Beach who couldn’t imagine getting old or sick or weak, like the fin de siècle fops who wore their sexual difference as a defiant fashion stance, are generally biographies with unhappy endings. There have always been “these peaks and valleys of when people are allowed to express themselves, and then things change. And we can’t think that they’re never going to change again,” he says. What he’s drawn to “is not purely doom, because there’s also a free expression of beauty, and a lot of love. But those moments go hand in hand with a threat. And the example of AIDS is that something completely unforeseen is always possible.”
So the young men from those magazines will take their places on the walls of the gallery alongside Paul P.’s other work. It’s a way of making sure that they don’t go away, even as seeing them may move us to confront the probabilities of how things turned out — or how they might turn out again. “I don’t think they have to be looked at as sad portraits,” he says. “It’s very possible they’re among the living, too.” He doesn’t mind not knowing.
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