Paul P., "Sibilant Esses"
Greene Naftali Gallery | 508 West 26th Street
Through January 11, 2025
To utter this show’s title, “Sibilant Esses,” is to momentarily adopt its referenced affectation—the hyperarticulated “s” of stereotyped effeminacy in gay speech. (Try it.) The Canadian painter Paul P.’s half-joke is the icing on the cake, the final overdetermining flourish that situates his libidinal-conceptual practice foremost in a network of past homosexual styles. Overlapping eras of queer-coded visual culture fall dreamily in and out of sync with a wavering art-historical timeline here, in his Greene Naftali debut.
Since the aughts, the artist has used archival sources—particularly gay porn from the ’70s—in his small-scale portraits, favoring cropped views of faces and upper torsos. Sometimes, hairstyles (such as a Bowie mullet) date his subjects to a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS period; sometimes, P.’s lurid palette can flag his canvases as inauthentically antique. But mostly, they are convincingly beautiful and painterly in a 19th-century (or earlier) way. The bedroom eyes and stoned grins or parted lips of lovely young men—rendered with the age-old soft-focus technology of oil paint—emerge from an erotic, elegiac haze.
