Ruins of Rooms looks at the notion of portraiture through the lens of Jimmy DeSana (1949–1990, US) and Paul P. (1977, CA). With their works set in a range of different interiors, the artists are brought into dialogue for the first time.

Jimmy DeSana was a photographer whose portfolio spans works from the late 1960s until 1990 when he died of an AIDS-related illness. Growing up queer in postwar suburban Atlanta informed his early black-and-white series 101 Nudes (1972/1991), for which he arranged his and his friends’ naked bodies in middle-class domestic environments. Moving to New York in 1973, he distributed his work through local mail art networks and became a frequent contributor to General Idea’s File magazine. A fixture in New York’s punk and no-wave scene and queer fetish subculture in the late 1970s and early 1980s, DeSana was known for taking portraits among the city’s avant-garde. He returned to staging nude models in mundane settings for his colorfully lit Suburban series (1979-85), continuing his explorations of consumerism and S-M aesthetics. Contracting HIV in the mid 1980s led to changes in his body that shifted his artistry towards more abstract and experimental imagery, often capturing everyday objects, as seen in Grill (1987) and Chair (1988).

Paul P. has been known for his melancholy drawings and paintings since the early 2000s. His mostly untitled portraits of young men are inspired by photographs from gay erotic magazines found in the LGBTQ2+ archives in Toronto, specifically, those from the years between the onset of gay liberation in the late 1960s and the nascent AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. With an interest in the historical methodologies of representing homosexual desire, P. appropriates this explicit archival material, employing the coded visual language of late 19th-century painters. His fragile works remove his subjects from their original context and reimagine their faces to hold both the memory of ancient queer innuendo and the premonition of future tragedies. More recently, Paul P. began creating sculptures in the form of furniture. The delicate wooden folding screens, desks and stools move between the functional and the sculptural, inspired by Edward William Godwin, a Victorian design reformer, Eyre de Lanux, Art Deco designer-decorator, and artist Scott Burton who was contemporaneous with DeSana.

Ruins of Rooms functions like a matryoshka doll. It expands our understanding of portraiture through an overlapping conversation between artists of different generations and is dedicated to those lost.

Curator: Krist Gruijthuijsen
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken