Paul P. : The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset

For over 25 years, the foundation of Paul P.’s practice has been a series of portraits of anonymous young men, their images appropriated from gay erotic magazines produced between the late 1960s and the early 1980s; a period bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the onset of the AIDS crisis. The head-and-shoulders format he favours constricts the libidinal pull of the source material, directing attention instead toward the models’ expressions of youthful reticence and self-knowledge.

P. has written, “beyond the gay images from the 1970s, I look further back to Whistler, Sargent, Montesquiou, and Proust to locate the atmosphere in which to portray this physicality.” These defiant dandies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries sought to represent queerness under repressive law, deploying inflection, allegory, and inference as formal strategies (and forms of resistance), and it is these coded visual languages that he draws upon.

Alongside portraits, there are works including bats emerging from dense clouds, laundry strung against a hazy sky, and a wave slipping into shore at night: subjects in which fading light renders beauty both transient and luminous. These paintings are organised around moments of threshold: twilight scenes in which deep shadows and silvery light coexist.

The artist’s methodology considers desire, refinement and beauty, yet these considerations are edged with unease. The men depicted existed within a narrow period of freedom, and their individual fates remain unknown. In bringing together the coded visual languages of the Victorian era and the archive of post-Stonewall erotic culture, P. reminds us that certain freedoms remain cyclical, not assured.

Free

Wednesday – Saturday, 11 am – 6 pm

London Gallery Weekend hours:
Friday 5 to Sunday 7 June, 11 am – 6pm