Gay Art
As I say in the introduction, love has no labels. Art as well has not! But we can say for sure that a new subject has shown up lately, something we didn’t see since the time of greek and roman ancient art. We could define it in many different ways: gay art, queer art, LGBT art,… The correct term to use is a very difficult matter to approach, and it’s impossible to reach an agreement without disappointing someone. So I’ve opted for this title, just because it’s the most commonly used and despite someone rejects it for being not inclusive of all the different realities, I guess we should spread its meaning and not searching for a new complex definition. Sorry for this premise, now let’s go straight into the issue.
A progressive vision is the guiding principle of all my work, but here, gay life, gay love, etc. are the main subjects of these paintings, drawings, and mixed media. Gay art is a pillar of my whole art production and one of the reasons why I started painting.
Gay Art as way for a Gay Activism
I’ve always considered myself a gay activist, even dough I fight my battle mainly inside my studio.
Happy together series, the beauty of gay love
Three of the paintings you find here, Happy together 1, 2, and 3, were exhibited for the first time in Bologna in 2013. In those days in Italy, the government was talking, with great delay compared to the other European countries, about the same-sex marriage. Then my aim was to highlight the beauty of love, and the gay love of course, as I experienced it in my life. Our lovers face the viewers and seem to ask them why we have yet to struggle to have elementary rights. I titled them Happy together because I wanted to draw the attention to the importance of staying together for our community. Besides, it reminded me of the wonderful movie by Wong Kar Way.
There’s a painting that precedes these series, it’s “The light is behind us”, dated 2008, here, the positive message of the Happy together series, necessary to promote our campaign outside the gay community, is replaced by a deeper investigation on the crisis of a couple, a gay couple that has the same problems of every other couple.
La Falla, daddy-twink relationship
In 2016, “La Falla”, the magazine of the Group “Il cassero” in Bologna, one of the leading group for gay rights in Italy, asked me to design a poster to illustrate one of the topics of that edition.
It was the daddy-twink relationship. It was a great challenge to me because the color is a key feature of my style, and they requested me to create something black and white with just an extra color. In this case, they choosed the Pantone 7446 U, a sort of lilac, and as I said this was the only color I could use.
The poster has also been included in a summary book.
Filo 1 and 2
There is a totally different genesis for these two big paintings, Filo 1 and Filo 2. I started both of them in 2005, Filo 1 was terminated quite soon, for Filo 2, 4 years were needed instead. For a long time, I couldn’t secure a satisfactory outcome, then eventually, after many attempts, I could come up with a solution.
The idea at the source was to merge two opposites or better to let them coexist in the same work. It’s something that I developed in many other paintings of that period as well. Every element has a double possible interpretation. Let’s start from the name, Filo in Italian means Thread. The boys are playing with the threads all around. They pull them, the clothes are something that shows and hides at the same time. You don’t even understand if it’s a game, or something different. I wanted to keep this ambivalence on all sides.
I make another example, in the same period I painted “Ki… me!”. The viewer could fill the missing part of the name with “ss” or “ll”, and my aim was to keep both possibilities alive in the painting.
Gay art in other sections.
There are several other works that relates to gay art that I haven’t included in this website, not to overload it, and other works too, that I have preferred to include in other pages. For example in the Happy together page you’ll find Hercules which is quite clearly a party night in a gay club. Aquarius 1 and 2, are on the same page but could have been here equally.
Future plans
In the very recent works and in my plans for the future, gay art still has a central role. But, I want it to be part of a wider scope, where genres do not matter at all. A free, open-minded World is the World I want to describe. Aquarius 1 and 2, are exactly in this perspective.
Links help the web to grow!
An interesting article about a modern Master, David Hockney, a pioneer of Gay Art.
Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool, this is the painting by David Hockney this interesting article of The Guardian talks about, read it here.