Paul P.
Untitled
2002
Colored pencil on paper
paper: 8 1/2 x 11 (21.5 x 28 cm); frame: 10 3/8 x 13 in (26.5 x 33 cm)
Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley
Drawings comprise an important part of the practice of Paul P. (b. 1977, lives and works in Toronto), and this work is an early work instance of P.’s longstanding interest in portraits of young men recaptured from gay pornography magazines of the 1960s through 1980s. “I am searching for analogies,” P. has said, “and the touching of hands between past and present.”
Rather than rendering his subjects realistically, Paul P. flatters and romanticizes them, using a drawing technique typically associated with Victorian portraiture. His tightly cropped, close-up drawings of flowers and the faces of adolescent boys highlight the fleeting, ephemeral beauty of both.
– MoMA collection text, Paul P., Untitled (2003)
The situating of such contemporary objects of desire in the frames of art history makes evident something that has been hidden…[this] is echoed even in the artist’s anonymous-seeming name: a mixture of the upfront and the hidden, the visible and the mysterious. There is a cat-and-mouse feeling about the sensuality here: defiant, clearly drawn from pornography’s all-out aesthetic, but laconic, muted, inexplicit.
– Emily Hall, Paul P. at Daniel Reich, Artforum, Vol. 47, No. 7, March 2009
P. installs his portraits in precise arrangements with his abstract shadow paintings and sculptures (of which desks form a prominent series).
P.’s work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey; Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Provenance
Maureen Paley, London
See also
Paul P. in the collection of the MoMA
Paul P. at the 2014 Whitney Biennial
Emily Hall, Paul P. at Daniel Reich, Artforum, Vol. 47, No. 7, March 2009
Simon Wu, “When Paul P. Thinks of Boys,” Frieze, December 5, 2024
Mark Harris, “The Artist Who Chronicles the Doom Generation,” The New York Times, October 31, 2024