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His paintings are in no way pornographic or exploitative but instead take these young men and raise them into icons of outlawed sexuality. “Having been born in 1977, I’m indebted to the community of artists who operated throughout this mortal emergency, and the many who died in and around the early 90s as I came into my sexual and artistic awareness,” the artist explains.
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The young men he paints – often solely focusing on their disembodied faces – are all taken from vintage gay erotic magazines, specifically from the years between the advent of gay liberation in the 1960s and the awareness of the Aids crisis in the early 1980s. His intimate paintings and delicate sculptures have garnered him steady, quiet success – with lauded shows at Queer Thoughts in New York, and spaces in the collections of MoMA and the Whitney in New York, the AGO in Toronto and LACMA in Los Angeles. For him, this romanticised otherworldliness is an indicator of a history of personal desire and difference. What does beauty look like? In the world of Canadian artist Paul P., it is a particularly ghostly take on the queer.