An Artist Who Chronicles the ‘Doom Generation’
TO BE A gay artist like Paul P., a painter who became known in the early 2000s New York art world as part of a set of young artists revitalizing the then-unfashionable form of portraiture, is to live and work within two timelines simultaneously.
There’s the timeline of art history, long enough to be measured in epochs and eras and movements, and the one of openly expressive gay culture, which is so furiously compressed that, since the 1969 Stonewall uprising, it has essentially shed its skin and become something new every five years or so.
The first history can be found in museums and textbooks; the second, until recently, had been preserved only when someone was prescient enough to know that what others might dismiss as disreputable, disposable or degraded was worth retrieving and archiving.
The bewitching quality of Paul P.’s portraits is that their creator, a serious, studious and engaging Canadian, is aesthetically bilingual.
