I can’t recall when I first encountered Paul P.’s work. This is less a comment on the potency of his images—all those dreamily painted, glabrous, bantamweight boys—and more an affirmation of his images’ suppleness, their tendency to drift and circulate. This is a way of saying that I seemed to be inhaling his work from the very moment that I was captured by the art world’s recondite happenings. I do recall the first time I wrote about Paul: early 2006, in a brief review of a group show, “I Love My Scene,” curated by José Freire at Mary Boone. At the time, I noted that his subjects looked “like they were born from the seedbed of Dennis Cooper’s id.” Little did I know that Dennis and Paul were already connected—that, in fact, the two now live in the same apartment building in Paris, further evidence that our paths in life are delineated according to the uncanny magnetism of shared sensibilities.

Paul was born in 1977 in Hamilton, Ontario, but grew up in Toronto, never really living in his town of birth. While he earned a BFA at York University, he does not believe his education to have had much bearing on his practice. It was around 2001-02, the time of his first solo exhibition at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, when Paul began to plumb the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archive for source material. Prior to that watershed moment, he used similar material gleaned from less institutional locales.

For all of the allusions to Marcel Proust, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, Paul’s diaphanous portraits of young men can really slut it up. In a way, Paul is a Pop artist, skillfully transmuting and recontextualizing the boys he finds in vintage gay porn, delicately merging the worlds of smut and art. But his work has little of the irony associated with Pop or its successors, none of the self-reflexive pastiche.

In her essay for Paul’s artist book Nonchaloir (2007), Collier Schorr writes: “Each [boy] is a thousand worlds of desire and repression hidden in plain sight. Edmund [White] on the back deck at a Pines Party. Gore [Vidal] in the Auchincloss mansion dreaming of a St. Albans crush.” White and Vidal are principal protagonists in the mythologies of modern gay life, and Paul’s boys are ciphers for entire worlds of gay knowledge, elusive delegates for a fragile, complex genealogy of aesthetic mores, all hewn to the same succinct physical urgency, the same illicit desire.

What follows is an interview that I conducted with Paul in February 2008. At the time, Paul was developing a body of work for “When Ghost Meets Ghost,” his London debut this spring at Maureen Paley.


David Velasco: Let's begin simply and in the moment: your last group of paintings at Daniel Reich Gallery was inspired by Venice, particularly the work that Sargent and Whistler did there. Is there a difference between the paintings that you made for your New York show and the ones that you're making now for your London debut at Maureen Paley?

Paul P.: In New York the exhibition was about ideas surrounding Venice—art historical, literary, sexual, and aesthetic, and the work used the metaphors of the place to highlight an aspect of the figures. The show had an environmental sense of color that played off Venice’s light, and most of the works were of figures amid architecture or in darkened interiors. Also, they were all works on paper, either in pastel or watercolor. Many works quoted from Whistler’s work in Venice, and a few impressionistic drawings were done on site. Most of it was quite murky in tone, but light in touch. The works that I’m preparing for the London show are oil paintings, very low-key, some almost black and others in shades of opal grey, which envelop the figures in color and tone so that they almost resemble monochromes. They have a sense of theatricality, either of the stage or the pose of an artist’s model in the studio. It’s an artful pose, whereas the figures in the Venice series evoke the city’s nonchalant inhabitants.

DV: The concept of the model has always played an intriguing role in your work, since many, if not all, of your images are inspired by boys from 70s porn, models who were originally posing for a camera and whose guiding principle was to incite erotic desire. How do you distinguish artful poses in porn, as opposed to nonchalant ones?

PP: The difference between an artful pose and a nonchalant one can come down to aesthetic shifts. Almost all of my male figures come from these sources, but each time the figure is plucked out of his original context and placed somewhere quite different; at the same time, the model’s pose and physiognomy had already somehow suggested his new environment to me. Just as the artists whom I admire could shift from formal portrait to erotic sketch—each time sustaining their art’s evocative atmosphere and exotic qualities—I focus on certain conventions in art to bring out different aspects from my subjects. In the Venice pictures, the figures are components of the larger scene and thus have more in common with genre painting. The models in the London work exist in a lamp-lit, vaguely studio-like place.

DV: Where do you get these source images, and what do you think happens to them in the process of painting them? What do you look for in a boy?

PP: The gay magazines from which I draw my material belong to a different era that either presupposed, or later, immediately benefited from sexual liberation. Their publication was more artisanal than what we would see now, and the range of influences was refined [including] everything from Thomas Eakins to New Wave cinema. Self-proclaimed “nudist” or “physique” magazines often toyed with theatrical and art historical re-creation. Even in the seedier Times Square images of trade [men, often straight, who prostitute for other men], one can locate the elements of an artistic pose that can blossom with just the slightest change of context. Paint or pastel can activate this. I do all of my research at the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives in Toronto. I do not leave their premises with the material. I am allowed to make photocopies, and that is what I bring back to the studio, so they are already removed, cropped, and cataloged in my own way before any drawing begins. What I look for in these pictures is a body or face that has, in its pose or expression, something that transcends its sexual context, but nonetheless profits from it to evoke something more emotional or aesthetic. I look for something that reminds me of art.

DV: I'm curious to know what keeps you going back to the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, especially now that you live in Paris. Is it a political gesture? A nostalgic one? Or is it simply more practical? Have you ever considered using images that aren't from the archive? You and the artist Scott Treleaven now live in the same building as Dennis Cooper, who has one of the most impressive digital archives of porn images imaginable. Would you ever consider using some of his images, or even collaborating with him? If not, what is it about the printed photograph that draws you to it?

PP: I do have something of a sentimental attachment to the Archives in Toronto. I have been going there for years. I also donate materials to them, and what I have in exchange is a very developed relationship that includes my casual access to their collection, which would otherwise only handle specific requests—and I need to leaf through it all. This is part of the same tactile need that keeps me from turning to digital sources. I need to understand the images in their entire contexts—the myriad of titles, in very few or copious issues, the ads, drawings, the arc of the photo shoot, letters from the editors. These are all fascinating for me. The Archives were created and are maintained by a group of people who came out of Canada’s strongest wave of gay activism in the 70s, and although the political climate has changed so much since then, what remains is a huge amount of care. It’s affecting to discover a new pile of cardboard boxes filled with magazines from the past forty years, just brought in by the friend of a man who recently died, and then to watch each piece cataloged. The whole idea of the Archive in general resonates with me, and one aspect of my continued work in portraiture is the subsequent creation of one, albeit selective and relatively small. Dennis handles his collection in a different way, digitally, probably because the burden of originals is too much, and originals could not be as easily disseminated as they are on his blog. Of course, Dennis has made his particular selections based on his tastes, and again, I prefer to return to the original selections of those renegade publishers to make my pick. I think that Dennis imbibes visuals to arrive at words, and it’s those that correspond best with what I do. I am not much of a collaborator, but I would enjoy seeing our respective works in a shared context.

DV: I'm curious to hear more about your idea of the archive. I recall a lecture by Gayle Rubin from 2003 in which she argued that since gay and lesbian identity isn’t routed through family lineage (like most minority groups are), the work of the archive is both more difficult and more crucial for establishing a sense of history. Your work stems from this one archive in particular. Do you have a nostalgia for the period? I've read a lot of Edmund White this past year, and his writing provokes in me a longing for the gay experience of the 70s. In continually mining this source, and a particular kind of boy in particular, do you have any larger goals? To draw attention to or memorialize the period? Or do you revel in the pleasures of capturing and recontextualizing these images? There's certainly a sort of poetry to the idea of painting an archive.

PP: My work combines the idea of lineage with that of the archive. Lineages stretch into the future as well as into the past, and that gives my art activity. Even though I begin by mining an archive, I manipulate it for art, making something that I hope returns to the archive later—and it is skewed in favor of aesthetics. You are right that painting an archive makes poetry. This is why in figurative painting and drawing, aesthetic and emotional lineages are so important; they are the most ephemeral, taking form through taste and impulse. Beyond the gay images from the 70s, I look further back to Whistler, Sargent, Montesquiou, and Proust to locate the atmosphere in which to portray this physicality. I’m uneasy with nostalgia, as I don’t feel that I can come by it honestly because of my age. I am very sentimental toward the emotions I ascribe to these times, and I think that this has given me the impulse to be a student of certain artists, or a painter of a certain face, to make work that evolves according to a tradition—to copy at the same time that I create, and to advance our own version of the “classical.” Those like Edmund White have such amazing physical experiences to share from their epoch, and it can make us feel an acute lack with regards to our own time. Their period of sexual ecstasy came to a crashing halt just as you and I were born. But I think that we have our own grand narrative, albeit a lonelier and more inert one, as we are the first generation to grow up literally equating sex with death. Since this has become naturalized in us, our imaginations are, I think, more fearless and our visual appetites more whetted, and I think that it’s given me an atavistic aesthetic more in common with homosexuality in more repressed times. So I suppose that these are some of the things that I hope to touch on—but it’s not my goal to memorialize. I have a reverence for my subjects, but mostly I want to make aesthetic pictures.

DV: In gay history (especially as written by White, or Andrew Holleran, among others), there is a feeling that the 70s was a time of complete jouissance, and that we’ve essentially missed the boat. Sex and death are obviously such essential topics for artists. In his own unsentimental fashion, White once said that, artistically, gay men are lucky to have AIDS, because it gives them a grand topic. I’m interested in the idea that mostly you “want to make aesthetic pictures,” and that you look to older literature and artistic sources for the atmosphere you evoke. Fewer and fewer artists seem to take aesthetics or mood very seriously in their works, but it’s something you privilege. Perhaps even more than the political dimensions of your work?

PP: Political and conceptual ideas in my work will always be secondary. I believe beauty to be the reason for art; this beauty can be sad, unsettling, or conflicted and may have nothing in common with mainstream attractiveness, but finally I admire that which maintains an aesthetic universalism after the politics of the time change. I am attracted to certain honest clichés—the nude, the face, flowers, Venice.

DV: Whom, if anyone, do you consider your peer? Are there other contemporary artists whom you admire, that you feel like you learn from?

PP: I do feel very connected to [certain] others working now. These include Hernan Bas and Lesley Vance as painters. And I am aware that what I do has found a place because of the intimate and observational qualities set forth by David Hockney and more recently by Elizabeth Peyton. The phrase “haunting ghosts” often occurs to me when I think of what I have in common with the artists with whom I feel close, the idea meaning an inverted way of pursuing the things that emotionally affect me, things that are fleeting, dead, or lost in mystery and time. It could also be described as an aesthetic spiritualism, especially when I consider the close commune that I make with artists like Whistler or with the faces of the models I’m rendering. A tendency that I recognize in my work and in the artists I admire is an ability to create the feeling of a still life from pictures of people and places. I feel connected to Collier Schorr's strategies of imposing certain artistic and gender narratives on the figure, specifically her way of using a young man’s body to conjure the feminine form, such as when she locates qualities in the German boy Jens F. through whom she channels Andrew Wyeth's model Helga. Vance makes paintings of flowers or a seashell that are so terribly emotional that their image transcends the impact that the object could possibly have today by somehow dragging out a spectral sorrow from the past to arrive at what they are. I suppose that I’m into work that deals in the alchemy of art.

DV: That's such a departure from many of today’s barely winking, arty conceptualist stances. Peyton and Bas make sense of course, but I almost see more resonance with Schorr, especially in her last exhibition at 303 Gallery, which showed her struggling to invoke a particular spirit of the late 60s, to mine the subject of her history in a deeply personal, artful manner. It’s interesting too that both of you have managed to translate your practice into fashion—her with her seductive ads for Comme des Garçons, you with your 2006 collaboration with Hedi Slimane for Dior Homme. Could you talk briefly about what it was like to collaborate with Slimane? Do you find yourself sharing certain values or priorities with the world of fashion?

PP: As I’ve mentioned, I don’t consider myself an easy collaborator, but there was something almost fait accompli about the project. When I saw the images of the model, it was clear that they had been composed just the way I would have wanted: downcast eyes in one, noble profile in another, and my favorite in profil perdu! For some time already, Hedi’s silhouette and gestures, which suggest a vulnerability and a femininity to the male form, had been on my mind. The actual drawing felt quite effortless, which is, I think, due to our aesthetic connection, which I am glad wasn't talked out too much. Instead, it seemed to manifest with each of us going back and forth to please the other, playing within the refined overlap of our styles: my delicate graphite drawings along with his portrait photographs, the former in harmony with his minimal and silver-grey brand design, and the latter with the poses of the drawings I’d previously made. While I find fashion exciting, I don't admire its restrictions of schedule and commerce, but within it, there are some exceptional aesthetic leaders. I think that I have the priorities and values of an artist, but it [would be] a mistake to assume that some of the best fashion designers have anything different. Around the time that the press came out for the Dior campaign, I was bored to see how many people were provoked by the “meeting of fashion and art” as something new, whereas in my historical interests, they have influenced and referenced each other for the last few hundred years. The codes of menswear and the ways in which runway and ad campaigns can push them toward the feminine and eccentric are wonderful; I see an image of a young man in a silk kimono-style jacket—and it’s just what I was trying to say!

DV: For an artist who devotes as much attention as you do to the male form, to the properties and inflections of particular profiles and silhouettes, it would be strange not to imagine at least a resonance between your work and the practice of fashion. I agree, too, that the more regulated schedule and economic demands of fashion can be restrictive, though, of course, some artists have complained of a similar demand on the part of galleries and art fairs; I wonder too, with respect to haute couture, if that level of devoted patronage can also be somewhat liberating—or at the very least productive and enabling.

PP: I like how an aspect of men’s fashion is compelled to reference femininity. When I portray images of men, my art historical references are always pictures of female models. It's the late nineteenth-century codes of presentation—louche, fatigued, natural, noble, that I am reminded of, and it is true that these characteristics still have significance in the world of men’s fashion.

DV: A while back you moved to Paris, a city with a remarkable sense of its own style, which goes hand-in-hand perhaps with the city’s particular penchant for privileging the cultural sphere. I wonder, what drew you and Scott to the city? Does the pace of daily life in Paris influence your practice?

PP: Paris is, at least historically, an artist’s city. Although now the attention has shifted elsewhere, something remains, and I am attracted to that combined sense of past achievement and future possibility which Paris affords me, especially as someone coming from a very new part of North America. For a year-and-a-half now, Scott and I have lived in Paris. I spent a few restless years making temporary homes in Vienna and Los Angeles, before settling here. We learned about our apartment, which is a seventeenth-century convent, through Dennis who had been living here for some time already.

DV: Does being an artist mean something different in Paris than in Toronto or New York? Are you happy there?

PP: It’s difficult to say, but I think that being an artist in New York means for many that you’re working very hard, and that refers to financial success. But in Paris, being an artist seems to mean to others that you’re filled with interesting ideas and perspectives, that you are some sort of distinguished citizen. The particular qualities of light that exist here have an enormous impact on my work. The winter sky is a silvery blue, or a purple-grey milky opal, which hangs in an endless hued veil and tints the stone buildings; it’s a refractory city, monochromatic and chameleon-like. And then at night it’s another thing, all warm gold on black. My interest in light began with my first visit to Venice, and it continues here. Paris’s effect on me is something like the Aurora Borealis! You could see its effect beginning to show in the works from [my last show], “Place Names,” but you will see it much more in this new suite of paintings.