Richard Hawkins: Scalps, Dungeon Doors & Salome Paintings

“Mexican kids with fake I.D.’s, big fat hairy guys before bears had their own scene … and drag queens out of drag.”

Richard Hawkins, “Scalps, Dungeon Doors and Salome Paintings,” 2011. Installation view. Courtesy of Galerie Daniel Buchholz.

Richard Hawkins: Scalps, Dungeon Doors & Salome Paintings
Ali Fitzgerald

In lieu of a press release for his show at Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Richard Hawkins offers a literary dirge, lamenting the loss of gay poets as well as the King of Hearts, an industrial gay bar offering asylum to “minorities within a minority.” Hawkins recalls the patrons as “Mexican kids with fake I.D.’s, big fat hairy guys before bears had their own scene … and drag queens out of drag.”

Hawkins’ treatise on L.A.’s erstwhile gay underground offers a colorful counterpart to his newer Salome paintings and Scalps, which, like his earlier works, are doggedly supple and willfully strange. With the Salome series, Hawkins flaunts a blissful lack of historical restraint, dispensing cellar doors, screaming men, and invented perspective with the ease of someone who never saw the James Ensor exhibition at MOMA.

Hawkins overlays Italian archways and cellars with sensual, lounging youths and leering, detached zombie heads. These heads hover over the picture plane like lecherous specters, with tortured, funny, Munchian visages. His boys are also funny, and have whittled down features like the indistinct ideal of a Greek Faun or avatar.

In Already Bald, Hawkins paints a solitary floating head, bald, frowning, and physically separated from the wooden background through painterly invention. Hawkins isolates his aging phantoms; a layered practice begun earlier with his collages, in which photos of cute stars like Keanu Reeves are superimposed over Chinese lanterns and scrawled paper. Hawkins seems to like forced coexistence, a practice he talked about in regard to his recent retrospective at the Hammer Museum.

The new paintings look like Hanna Barbara-inspired moonshine dens, with the dark fetishistic impulse tempered by cartoon rivets and groovy wood grain. Their backgrounds somehow resemble an animated version of the Leipzig School, but Hawkins’ peculiarly garish greens and pinks interrupt any self-serious expressionist imitation. Indeed, Hawkins himself cites both Bullwinkle and low budget theme parks as influences for his paintings, which are steeped in the language of the cheap, childlike ornament.

Although Hawkins is deeply engaged in the language of painting, the split materiality of his work also services his narrative world—a world interested in seclusion, voyeurism, and the delicacy of memory. In one of his Dungeon Door paintings, Hawkins layers planes of existence, embedding a smaller canvas into a larger one.

Alongside these paintings, Hawkins reinterprets older Scalps, a series of fragile assemblages that read as tender and disturbing mementos of lost boys. The new scalps retain their unassuming rubber hallmark, functioning as sweetly abject tokens of the past. But here Hawkins has replaced the photos of cute guitarists with swathes of paint, obscuring the romantic object and fusing the personal with the painterly.

Also displayed are Hawkins’ Shoeboxes, which will house the scalps after the show. While the scalps speak to the ephemeral nature of infatuation, the shoeboxes nod to the harried conservatorship of our art and life. It’s hard not to see Hawkins’ rubber hangings, cardboard boxes, and perpetually unfulfilled zombies as stand-ins for the entropic force of aging, which his painted gestures oppose.