Toronto’s Paul P.’s exhibit takes and unconventional approach, uniting contemporary and modern works
Curator Sonia Del Re within a sculpture by Toronto based artist Paul P. titled Escritoire Nancy-2013, in mahogany, that is part of the exhibition Paul P. : Amor et Mors at the National Gallery of Canada. Photo by ERROL MCGIHON /ERROL MCGIHON
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada not only showcases the recently acquired work of Paul P., a contemporary artist from Toronto, but also places it next to historical pieces from the collection that illustrate how queer artists were driven to obfuscate the sexual expression of their art out of fear of persecution.
Thirty works by Paul P. are featured in the show, titled Amor et Mors, along with about 15 rarely seen pieces from the gallery’s collection, including Annibale Carracci’s Study for a Satyr or Faun; James McNeill Whistler’s The Thames; and a 1913 portrait of Robert de Montesquiou by Paul César Helleu.
For the soft-spoken and scholarly artist, who is represented in the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art, among others, the exhibition marks the first time his work has been on view in Canada’s top art institution. It’s also the first sampling of his work to be purchased by the gallery, thanks to the support of patron Diana Billes in 2020.
“It feels extraordinarily good,” the 46-year-old artist said in an interview during a media viewing of the show. “I was not represented in the collection beforehand but now we have 30 works so that feels like great progress. And to have it move into an exhibiting context, it feels fantastic and also very natural at the same time, too.”
Toronto based artist Paul P. and curator Sonia Del Re worked together to present the exhibition Paul P. : Amor et Mors at the National Gallery of Canada.Photo by ERROL MCGIHON /ERROL MCGIHON
Also notable was the gallery’s unconventional approach in matching the artist with a curator who specializes in historical work, not contemporary art. Sonia Del Re, senior curator of prints and drawings, got involved because of her deep knowledge of the gallery’s trove of 30,000 or so works on paper, and the desire to create a dialogue that spans the centuries. The oldest piece dates back to the 16th century.
“In my work, I cover over 500 years of history so normally I don’t venture into contemporary art but it just seemed like the perfect match because Paul’s work is so invested in the past,” Del Re explained, adding that it was the first time in her 20-year career to work with a living artist on a show.
“It was quite something to say I have a living, breathing artist in front of me and I can speak to him. It was thrilling that we could connect on all of these topics. He knew exactly what I was speaking about when I mentioned artists who are not household names.”
She was delighted, too, when Paul brought to her attention the beautifully rendered de Montesquiou portrait, and informed her that the flamboyant Parisian was a legendary figure in the queer community.
“It was a wonderful discovery,” Del Re said. “I always learn from my projects but to have an artist point out this specific portrait of a dandy icon was really a revelation. And it’s complete serendipity how well it works with Paul’s painting.”
Paul P. is known for his skill in drawing and painting, particularly evident in his ongoing series of portraits of young men, their likenesses inspired by the images published in gay erotic magazines of the 1970s. His artwork finds beauty, vulnerability and sensitivity in these pre-AIDS faces.
With a couple of exceptions, the show focuses on smaller, less splashy pieces. “Paul’s work is enigmatic, quiet and contemplative so I don’t think it would have been a good match to have something very bold,” Del Re said. “It was important to have these small-format, quieter works.”
Artist Paul P. alongside one of his works “Untitled 2019” at the National Gallery of Canada.Photo by ERROL MCGIHON /ERROL MCGIHON
At the same time that it’s celebrating Paul’s work, the show makes a powerful statement on free expression by demystifying what the artist describes as the “secretive visual language” of homosexual art of the ages, essentially forcing a handful of artists from the past out of the closet.
“If there was any confusion, ambiguity or oversight about an artist’s sexuality, exhibiting them within this exhibition in the context of innuendo and the history of implicit representation of homosexuality, (we’re) hoping that the research and the writings that Sonia and I have done enters the archives for posterity,” Paul said.
“I’m always trying to reconcile the opposing forces of the explicit and the implicit so they wrestle with each other,” he added. “I can’t really allow the implicit to continue when I’m being so obvious and direct about my statements but I do hope that someone can also just look at it and enjoy the work.”
City staff are looking into how to remove a large metallic spider from under a high-traffic bridge on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.
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The artwork, which startled some arachnophobic SkyTrain riders when it was installed earlier this month, was created by pop artist Junko Playtime.
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In an email to Postmedia News on Friday, city staff say they were made aware of the unsanctioned spider artwork located in a corridor for SkyTrain and CN/BNSF Rail.
The installation wasn’t done in consultation with the city or the rail corridor partners, city staff said. They’re trying to figure out the best way to remove the artwork so there is no damage to the bridge structure or rail lines.
Staff said the artist will have the ability to claim the work through the city’s impoundment process.
According to Playtime’s Instagram page, the eight-foot-diameter spider was installed at night recently on the north bank below the bridge between North Grandview Highway and Broadway.
Playtime, from Montreal, has gained a reputation over the past two years for installing very large and far-out insect like futuristic sculptures from scrap metal and household items.
The artist called this latest spider creation “Phobia 2023. Time to face our fears.”
The artist behind a guerilla sculpture installation in East Vancouver that the city plans to remove is fighting to save the work.
The art work in question is a large, black spider made of recycled materials affixed beneath an overpass near Broadway and Victoria Drive, and visible from the SkyTrain Millennium Line.
The city says the work was unsanctioned, and that it is in the midst of plans on how to best remove the spider.
The anonymous Montreal-based artist who goes by the moniker Junko Playtime is calling on supporters to contact the city and ask it to leave the guerilla installation, titled Phobia, in place.
1:54 Unsanctioned spider sculpture seen from Skytrain to be removed
“I think it’s a shame, there’s are a lot of people that really enjoy the artwork and would love for it to stay there. Sure, there are some people that might not like it, but it’s impossible to please everyone with public art,” Playtime told Global News in an email.
“The work is positioned in a way that doesn’t put anything or anyone in danger and can easily be ignored if someone doesn’t want to look at it.”
Junko Playtime contrasted the city’s reaction to the spider to the mounting piles of trash along the rail line where it was installed, saying it doesn’t make sense to remove the art but not the garbage.
“In terms of this piece, the city didn’t pay a dime for it. It’s built out of waste material collected in the streets so it’s essentially cleaning up some of the litter and there’s a huge amount of people that really enjoy it — seems like a pretty good deal to me,” he said.
1:39 City crews remove satan statue erected alongside busy Vancouver roadway
The City of Vancouver said the artwork was installed without review or approval, and that it began planning to remove it after complaints from the public.
It pointed to the city’s official public art program, which selects works through a jury process or its Public Art Committee, and that all approved pieces are vetted by engineers to ensure safety, structural integrity, longevity and maintenance plans.
“The installation of public art on key infrastructure, such as a bridge, would require due process to ensure safety. The unsanctioned spider artwork has not been through this review process,” it said in a statement Friday.
The cost of removing the spider remains unclear, according to the city.
The artist responded by suggesting leaving the piece in place was a chance for Vancouver to shake its dubious reputation as “no fun city,” which he said it had earned “for a reason.”
The spider is not the first artwork by Junko Playtime to appear in Metro Vancouver.
Last month, Habitat, a sanctioned piece he created from reclaimed materials appeared outside the Bentall Centre Gallery as a part of the Vancouver Mural Festival’s Winter Arts Festival.
Last year, a large, yellow, insect-like sculpture he created called Queen BX1000 appeared in an empty lot near the Fraser River near the Canada Line.
The artist, who said his work revolves around themes of biodiversity and ecological responsibility, said he designed the spider installation specifically for the location where he placed it, telling Global News, “the cliff face covered overhead by the large metal and concrete bridge really felt like a fitting environment for a creation like this to inhabit.”
The arrival of AI text generators and chatbots like Chat GPT and Bing (or is she named Sydney?) over the last year has shattered the assumption that creativity is the sole domain of humans, and other living things. But, while image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney are the visual equivalent technologies, the same crisis has not quite registered in the art world.
Perhaps, this lack of response stems from a lack of opportunity. No longer! Earlier this week, mega-gallery Gagosian opened an exhibition of works by DALL-E, which, like its AI image generator competitors, can turn a simple text prompt into an image in seconds. Might I find some crisis awaiting me there? (Yes).
The exhibition is produced by Bennet Miller, a film director who has been nominated for Oscars for Foxcatcher (2014) and Capote (2005); the works, and the exhibition are untitled. Over the past several years, Miller has been making a documentary about AI, through which he interviewed Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who gave him beta access to DALL-E far before the rest of the public.
The images DALL-E produces produce range from obviously amiss (twisted fingers, a fuzzy swirl of pixels) to hauntingly accurate in their targeting of one’s request. Despite these occasional flaws, no longer is the AI image quickly clocked for what it is by that tell-tale sheen of psychedelic patterning. It’s no wonder then why the word “real” was invoked, again and again, by the audience at Miller’s opening this week.
BENNETT MILLER Untitled, 2022–23
Pigment print of AI-generated image
Robert McKeever
One woman I pass gestures at one of Miller’s prints, a large piece laid on with deep, dark, wet-looking ink onto sepia-toned paper, depicting a child as she stares at the viewer while the wind tosses her hair. It looks as if it comes from the Victorian era, dated not just by its coloring but by what looks to be a simple, linen dress of the era. It’s all projection. The woman tells her friend, “It’s not real.” There is no linen dress.
Well, so what. It’s a bit melodramatic to behave as if we don’t already live in an era of unreal-ness. And anyways, since when does art require a real-world referent to represent something “real”? Since when is “realness” a metric?
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Sure, many of Miller’s works look like they could be photographs, but many are heavily stylized. Often extremely out of focus and piled on with grain, there is just enough form to suggest a subject or a landscape. Some of them seem to represent momentous or historical moments in the past. Here is a profile that looks Native American, extending an arm that could be a wing, that could be cultural dress. Here is a mushroom cloud, as if from an explosion, but flattened in a way that, perhaps, Nature wouldn’t allow. A machine like a train but it’s not. A disk, just a flat circle of some substance, held in the hands of a woman. Beguilingly simple, pointing back to nothing.
I spot Fran Lebowitz. Blunt, coarse bob, big coat, tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose and another set in her welt pocket. Loafers! It really is her. She’s thumbing through the exhibition text that was produced for the show by author Benjamin Labatut using ChatGPT, an AI text generator also produced by OpenAI. It turns out Miller also interviewed Lebowitz for his documentary, though it doesn’t seem clear why. She repeats an apology to me several times: she doesn’t know what this means, the exhibition, the fact of its genesis. But she makes an effort.
“These are not real photographs, but what are real photographs?” Lebowtiz begins. “Are the only real photographs the ones made on film, not the digital ones? My friend Peter Hujar would say so.”
The slippery slope tack: if we’ve accepted that cameras do not make the photographs, but that photographers do, why should any succeeding technology that the human mind directs for its purpose not be judged similarly? That is, as a genuine, human act of creation. I ask Lebowitz a clumsy question, something like, ‘Isn’t the labor of trying to make something worth something?” She says of course. What are we even talking about? It’s too basic but I can’t help it.
The concern about realness comes from two places. Where did these images come from and can we credit Miller with a “real” creative act. It’s really one problem: what do we do with this other actor in the picture, AI? What spasm was it that gave birth to these images, that Miller guided and curated?
It’s telling that these new tools are called AI “generators” not “creators”. Generation is to bring into being, but behind a veil. Generation has its roots in the phenomenon of conception, which is not done with the conscious mind but the secret efforts of the body. It is only in this way that I can relate to the concept of AI, this thing that brings into being without conscious, all the indifference and capability of nature. But this is false analogy (is there a word for anthropomorphizing but for nature? Naturmorphizing?). I’m not sure why I can’t see it as an extension of all the other amazing technological capabilities with their hidden mechanisms. I don’t know how my computer works.
BENNETT MILLER Untitled, 2022–23
Pigment print of AI-generated image
Robert McKeever
Walking around Miller’s show I’m surprised that so many people look happy and curious whereas I feel bitterly on guard. I look closely at each image, which range from looking like vintage photographs to charcoal drawings, and investigate for signs of their computerly origins. I’m not to be tricked!
As images, though, I do like them. They remind me of a picture book I once had and spark my love of old and whimsical looking things, for what that’s worth. A lot of AI images I’ve seen do this, that is, open the door to alternate, fantastical worlds, which says a lot about the people who request these images. There’s a lovely impulse to see something wondrous, magical, not of our reality. But how tightly and terribly joined is this desire for the fantastic to the impish twitch for falsity.
By now, haven’t we all seen those AI generated images of Trump getting arrested? How quickly we come back to Earth. One day it’ll feel normal. For now it’s tripping me up.
