TO BE A gay artist like Paul P.747 live, 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. He can speak about his indebtedness to the tradition of artists like John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, but also about the decades of research hours he’s put in at Toronto’s Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives — now called the ArQuives — from which he’s sourced the subjects of his paintings, poring over images of post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS magazine and gay-porn erotica for the face, the look, the come-on, the sulk or the mood that might inspire his next work.

“I’m an appropriationist,” he says when we meet in July at the New York gallery Greene Naftali, where he is preparing to have his first solo show in Chelsea in almost 15 years. “I mostly say that because, in a lot of representational figurative work, [what you see] is usually the artist’s circle of lovers, friends, models. In that way I’m very different. … I’m looking at magazines or printouts and redoing that activity over and over, and that’s how I underscore the importance I feel that those [archival] works have.” The period he explores is a window of only about a dozen years, full of lost boys — literally, since it’s almost impossible to know who they were, who survived and who succumbed, who was gay, who was straight, who was just trying to make enough money to get by. His art fuses both types of history — high and low, revered and discounted.

The young men we see in Paul P.’s portraits are, at first glance and at second, hard to pin down. They look immediate, present, of this moment, but they also seem almost spectral, perhaps from another world or a different reality. Their gaze is challenging, even posturing or seductive, but also vulnerable and open — that is, when we can see their eyes at all; sometimes, they’re downcast or turned just far enough away from us to make us uncertain whether they’re refusing to look back at us or simply unaware that we’re staring at them. Their attitude feels frankly erotic, even though we mostly see them only from the waist or the midchest up. They’re often presented against backgrounds pregnant with rich, implicative color, as if they were posing against storm clouds, but storm clouds that can change hue like mood rings to reflect the inner turbulence of those who stand among them. Occasionally they seem enshrouded in a kind of charged or narcotized haze. They appear suffused with desire, but it’s not clear whether the desire is theirs or ours.

ImagePaul P.’s “Untitled” (2023). Many of the artist’s paintings depict anonymous subjects culled from the ArQuives, formerly known as the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives, a nonprofit charity in Toronto founded in 1973.Credit...Courtesy of the artist, Greene Naftali, New York, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Maureen Paley, London, and Galleria Massimo Minini, Brescia. Photo: Júlia Standovár

They also evoke a sense of foreboding. His work is not AIDS art, but it is art that’s deeply informed by a feeling that the sensual is bound up with the ever-present possibilities of risk, hazard and illness. “I can’t claim any kind of nostalgia for that [1970s] period at all,” says Paul P., who is 47. “Because I have no firsthand knowledge of it — the before times, the halcyon days. I come from a very particular microgeneration, that of queer people whose sexual development occurred almost in lock step with the visible ravages of the AIDS crisis.”

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