When Paul P. Thinks of Boys

When Paul P. thinks of boys, he thinks of them lying down, hands on their pale chests. Or looking away, engulfed in green clouds. Or hands in the air, exposing the soft fuzz of their armpits. In his first solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, P. fills three enormous galleries with an array of tiny paintings which date from 2012 to 2024, as well as a series of metal sculptures. Most of the works are portraits. But, occasionally, the sequence erupts into flights of abstraction, as if to image his subjects’ ecstasy – or oblivion. All of the wall-hung works – some oil on linen, others watercolour on paper – are untitled, which makes them difficult to refer to in the singular, but adds to the feeling that they are meant to be experienced at once, in a melancholic haze.

Since the early 2000s, P. has drawn on images of boys that date from 1969 to 1980 – a specific interval of gay history that some hail as an Edenic period, post-Stonewall and pre-HIV/AIDS. His boys are lifted from gay pornography primarily found in Canada’s LGBTQ+ Archives, now known as The ArQuives. With the musician Joel Gibb, P. also produced the zine Gay Goth Scene (2001–17), named after a song that Gibb wrote about ‘a vicious cycle of gay goth teenage alienation’, as P. described in an interview published in Philip Aarons and AA Bronson’s Queer Zines: Vol. 2 (2014). ‘I was making portraits of guys from vintage gay porn magazines painted wearing masks with bats flying in the background,’ he continued.

That zine-inspired sensibility is dramatically dressed up in this show. Though the paintings are small, they command – almost arrest – the gallery’s cavernous first-floor exhibition space. They are installed in careful groupings – boy, boy, abstraction, boy – akin to the exquisitely composed stanzas of a poem. I walked through them, dazed, as if in a slow, ambulatory cinema. The installation is soul-dissolvingly, corrosively beautiful and I found myself yearning for a time that I did not live through. P.’s elegy to an allegedly halcyon era of gay history seems suffused with some kind of optimism, or at least reverence: perhaps, by conjuring these boys here now, they live on.

The boys remain nameless. There’s no real way of knowing the details of their lives: which of them died afterwards, which were gay or straight or anything else. They are always bathed in crepuscular purples, greens and blues that evoke the twilight of 19th century canvases by John Singer Sargent or James McNeill Whistler, but also a nightclub’s glow. The works vary in resolution, as if P. were constantly twisting his camera lens on this era. Some of the subjects are vivid and photorealistic; others are rendered in soft, painterly strokes – an idea, almost. One looks down, perhaps at his crotch; another closes his eyes in pleasure; a third smoulders directly at you through the scrim of history and paint. All of them appear lost, suspended, even when they meet your gaze.

And what is it about bats? The thinness of the skin on their wings, their veins full of other animals’ blood. The only linguistic insertion you will find in this show is the exhibition title, ‘Sibilant Esses’ – implying an identifiable gay voice – and the parenthetical appended to P.’s series of spindly brass and copper tables, ‘Untitled (les chauves-souris)’ (Untitled [Bats], 2024). Bats suck blood. They hang upside down. But they are fragile, misunderstood and actually pretty cute when you really look at them. They are also a particularly apt avatar for P.’s boys. Most active at night, between dusk and dawn, they are otherworldly creatures cordoned off between the death of sunset and the promise of sunrise.

Paul P., ‘Sibilant Esses’ is on view at Greene Naftali, New York until 11 January 2025

^{Main image: Paul P., ‘Sibilant Esses’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Greene Naftali, New York; photograph: Júlia Standovár}