| Two “golden ages” of sexuality come together in Paul P.’s tender drawings of sinuous, slightly gawky young men. Rendering his subjects in cinematic close-up, the young Canadian artist complicates the figures’ origins, 70s gay porn, with the grandeur and heightened sensibility of late-19th-century portraits. His subject matter recalls North America before AIDS while his style evokes Europe before the Great War. The work’s nostalgia for the pre-condom era of gay liberation also highlights the historical importance of erotic magazines for gay men, especially those living outside major cities. | 
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Helena Reckitt is the senior curator of programs at the Power Plant, Toronto. She is the curator of Paris-based artist Paul P.’s recent solo exhibition there called Dusks, Lamplights.
Two “golden ages” of sexuality come together in Paul P.’s tender drawings of sinuous, slightly gawky young men. Rendering his subjects in cinematic close-up, the young Canadian artist complicates the figures’ origins, 70s gay porn, with the grandeur and heightened sensibility of late-19th-century portraits. His subject matter recalls North America before AIDS while his style evokes Europe before the Great War. The work’s nostalgia for the pre-condom era of gay liberation also highlights the historical importance of erotic magazines for gay men, especially those living outside major cities.
HIV/AIDS instigated a sea change in gay culture, and the everyday youths that populated 70s gay erotica—“somewhat rough or unkempt but seductively beautiful and very real,” as P. says—were muscled aside in the mid-80s by buff, tanned bodies. Their pumped-up physiques seemed intended to compensate for, or ward off, the virus by conspicuously denying its wasting effects.
Since Halloween 2006, P. has lived in a 17th-century former convent near Canal Saint Martin in Paris. “Paris evokes traditional ideas of an artistic city,” he notes. “Coming from Canada—where what hangs in our museums isn’t usually the best and everything is so new—made me crave the art of the past, and older, historical working methods.
“Where I studied, very relaxed ideas about art circulated and I received little traditional technical instruction,” he recalls. “Consequently I have apprenticed myself to artists like Whistler and Sargent. It’s a copying phase that leads to the absorption of their ideas, and that many artists practice. Whistler was inspired by Rembrandt; Sargent drew deeply upon Velasquez.”
Historical interest merges with a debt to contemporary figures like Wolfgang Tillmans and Boston school artists like Jack Pierson, Mark Morrisoe, Nan Goldin, and David Amstrong. “They taught me about picturing young men and emotion,” P. says, adding that he also values Elizabeth Peyton’s intimate portraits and Karen Kilimnik’s sincere appropriation of different historical periods.
Having shown primarily outside Canada since 2002, P. returns to Toronto this fall for a solo show at The Power Plant (his first at a public institution). Entitled Dusks, Lamplights, the exhibition combines recent oil paintings, pastels, watercolors, drawings, and prints that depart from his earlier depictions of frisky models to present more melancholy portraits of both men and women in domestic, natural, and architectural settings. With Venice recurring as a backdrop, and linked by their atmospheres of dim and glimmering light, models swoon on sofas and peer from windows while figures on the verge of adulthood hover in doorways and seem to vanish into the background. The pictures recall pre-war Europe and pre-AIDS North America, and capture the brilliance of those eras’ exhausted final moments.
Like Pierson, Kilimnik, and the other artists he admires, P. clearly eschews the irony that informs much contemporary art. “My works may be somewhat campy, but they’re not ironic,” he insists. “They’re quite serious about how they are made. Yet they’re not earnest, either. They’re probably a bit too mauve for that, don’t you think?”
