Paul P.
Untitled
2012
Oil on canvas
13 x 9.5 in; 33 x 24 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Maureen Paley
While most well-known for his small paintings of young men, Paul P. (b. 1977, lives and works in Toronto) has also produced a series of abstract paintings based on “shadows,” of which this work is a good example. As with P.’s portraits, the intimate scale imparts both a devotional quality, in which the viewer can easily and fully possess the painting, as well as a humble anti-monumentalism, working against grandiose gestures associated with painting since the 19th century.
Similar to the way P.’s sitters are not taken from life but secondhand from ArQuives, a Toronto archive of gay pornography from the 1960s through the early 80s, P.’s shadow paintings recall the Shadows series of Andy Warhol. The abstract works are often installed next to the portraits suggesting a fungibility between the two subjects. “I am searching for analogies,” P. has said, “and the touching of hands between past and present.”
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.’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