I define myself as a gay and queer artist. I reject the use of the term “sexual orientation” to define my identity. My pictorial practice is as much an individual - and very intimate - act as it is a militant gesture of community and identity. I'm queer, so I sculpt and paint queer bodies. The ones I fantasized or dreamed of being as a teenager. The ones I missed because they didn't exist - or existed only in a hidden, taboo and dangerous way - in my personal construction. Those who were not visible, doubly invisibilized by the dominant heteronormative social ban and the danger of making visible this desire, my desire, our desire... a desire. So I use as models the bodies of my loves, the male body that has inspired many homosexual artists before me, the virile body that questions, through the dense depth of what it represents - the body as a motif, a symbol; as well as the emotion provoked by the work of other artists (photographers, painters, sculptors, performers, dancers... ).
My practice is fueled by a questioning of relations of domination and power; by our need to de-re-construct. My practice is inclusive, as is my writing, because it's about making these relationships visible. This is what my practice aims to do. It is built up in layers, by sedimentation, confrontation and superimposition. It's made of mistakes and letting go. Everything exists and remains visible on the canvas, because everything is important.
But always in a hurry. For painting, like living, is an emergency. Time flies and the world before is already on fire. Between going fast and slowing down.
Even if the chosen model image quickly loses importance, I feel that the rendering is still too much called by a realistic, figurative and recognizable form - that it's difficult to abstract oneself from the engraved image. “Even if you know you have to fill in the blank page. From the bottom of your heart pray to be freed from the image”, wrote Derek Jarman before he lost his sight. How can painting the body free us from the image? How can the male body convey a story other than that of toxic domination and violence?
Without wishing for the body to become a mere pretext for gestures, shapes and colors, and for painting to overtake it to reveal a landscape, a landscape in which we lose ourselves in order to find ourselves - nature is above all the human body #jesuisvivant - I question the architecture of the surface as much as that of the anatomy. The body is framed as a multitude of singular spaces: a deconstructed and reconstructed landscape where blues and pinks collide. Homosexuality in pink and blue, echoing gender stereotypes, but also “black” homosexuality (that of Genet, Pasolini, Mapplethorpe) confronting “white” homosexuality (easy, everyday, visible, diurnal) as defined by Guy Hocquenghem in 1975. Breaking out of this binary confrontation, the colors come together in a cameo. The raw cotton canvas takes in everything, and reserves breathing space. The body, both figured and forgotten, calls for a form of abstraction of the subject. But how to represent an abstract body? What would be the abstraction of bodies, if not the image of memory?
In the same way that queer identity proposes an abolition of the binary to accept the whole spectrum of individual identities, the richness of color and the importance and valorization of cultural diversities tend to liberate from the model-image towards abstraction. It's a queer practice that results from a personal digestion of the collective struggles of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Gender stereotypes, the image of virility and the masculine are questioned through the prism of the subject's choice. Muscular, almost atrophied, excessive, objetized bodies, vestiges of the Butch Queen, are part of gay culture and make visible the community's parallel history. From Physical Pictorial to the first homoerotic images - in costume to counter censorship - to Villages People, Tom de Finland or even Williham Zitte; from bodies devastated by AIDS to those sculpted by the practice of bodybuilding as a sign of belonging to the “healthy” group and a ritual of collective mourning; from the beginnings of the commercialization of gay imagery and fantasies to dating apps... this Butch Queen body marked the years 1990/2000, before the appellation Butch was taken up by virile lesbian women, and Queen, by the Ballroom and Drag scene as “legends. ” They mark the history of a community, as much as that of art and society. They play with codes, while becoming, over time, the quest for a fantasized ideal, for a body other than one's own: the one we make for ourselves. And in this desire to appear and define a new envelope for oneself, the possibility of blurring the mental barriers of gender is expressed, with the muscles of the “father” becoming a nourishing breast and a fertilizable womb.
We're not born a body, we become one.
Samuel Perche, August 2023
