(Full frontal male nudity, but in serious artworks, so — under the Fine Art Exemption — I can show them in WordPress; but this material is not for kids or the sexually modest)
Encountered recently on Pinterest: Saint Sebastian of Montreal, as painted by Dan(iel) Barkley. Pained, worn, fierce, gay, and hung. To contrast with the beautiful young St. Sebastian of my earlier posting today (by Owe Zerge, whose studio was in a rustic Swedish village) and with the young, outrageously — goofily — gay St. Sebastians concocted by the French duo Pierre et Gilles, surveyed recently in another posting of mine.
Now I’m going to do a quick review of those two recent postings, to give you a feel for the landscape of gay Sebastians, so you can appreciate how Barkley’s gritty saint stands out.
My 6/24/24 posting. The posting “P&G feel the agony of St. Sebastian”:
That’s Pierre et Gilles, the French collaborative artists — playful, way gay, outrageous, and exceptionally fond of sailors — and their approach to what I called, in a 5/20/11 posting, that
widespread and powerful homoerotic subject in artworks, the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian
From that posting, a P&G depiction of the arrow-pierced, agonized saint:
(#1) Saint Sebastian (1987), focused on the beauty of the young male body; this saint seems more anxious about the future than writhing in agony, and the composition is otherwise restrainedP&G have used StS as a subject at least seven times.
My posting from earlier today. The posting “Swedish male art from a hundred years ago”:
(#2) The head from a 1925 Saint Sebastian painting by Swedish artist Owe Zerge (1894 – 1983); even in the crowded field of homoerotic St. Sebastian depictions, the martyred saint in Zerge’s painting stands out as an exceptionally beautiful young man
Barkley 1. From the Body website, “An Interview with Daniel Barkley” by Jessica Mensch on 9/26/16:
JM: Daniel Barkley is a native Montrealer, born in 1962. He holds an MFA from Concordia University and his work has been shown throughout Canada and the United States in numerous group and solo exhibitions. Both the Musee des art contemprain des Laurentides in Quebec and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have curated retrospectives of his work
… I recently caught up with Daniel Barkley following the opening of his solo exhibition at Galerie Dominique Bouffard in Montreal, Quebec. His work repositions the figure, as seen in Roman and Christian mythology, somewhere between current conceptions of figuration in painting and photography, and a more personal and oftentimes autobiographical context.
… DB: When I returned full-time to painting, the AIDS crisis was here. Friends were ill or dying. My first paintings were really about this, but I was using old Christian myths as a framework to hang my experiences on.
JM: What were those myths?
DB: Cheerful chestnuts like Saint Sebastian, Salome, Ship of Fools, The Harrowing of Hell and Judith Beheading Holofernes… For me Saint Sebastian was symbolic of the young gay man, diseased and dying from the poison arrows that pierced his skin.
(#3) Study for Saint SebastianMore recently I’ve rendered him with the arrows removed to signify his survival. During the time of the plague in the Middle Ages, this image of Saint Sebastian was often prayed to because Europeans symbolically associated the arrows with the Black Death.
(#4) Saint Sebastian (2007): gaunt, weary, weighed down with pain, but defiant and triumphant over the arrows — and an openly sexual beingJM: The settings in your work stand in contrast to those found in Northern Renaissance paintings. They’re often painted with a muted palette and appear both sparse and expansive. Can you tell me about this.
(#5) Mirror Series I (2013) — muted, stark palette, set in an apparently limitless, empty spaceDB: My landscapes are Canadian. I depict the landscape I grew up with – the shores of the St. Lawrence River. It can be very bleak there, especially in winter. This starkness has inspired my rendering of space. The shores of the St. Lawrence were a great place to grow up. When I was a child we could swim in the river but pollution has made that impossible now. These shores are my go-to setting. It’s where many of my dreams take place – many of my bad dreams. Pollution in its many forms, is a threat and major source of anxiety in these dreams.
Barkley 2. From the ToTuart website, “Dan Barkley: Saint Sebastian” (in what I take to be a — not always felicitous — English translation of an original):
St. Sebastian is the first and most insistent gay icon.
Insistent, in the sense of being obvious, imposing, self-understanding. Saint Sebastian, young body punctured by arrows. Barkley’s [study for Saint Sebastian] is simply striking and may prompt you to look at other works by this artist. Gay, of course, Canadian, obsessed.
Daniel Barkley … is mainly interested in the body and even more in the male body. He is interested in men, especially the generously endowed ones, which gives an electrifying effect in combination with religious themes, in which the sexual elements are always tightly covered.
On the gallery, from its website:
The ToTuart art gallery specializes in contemporary art and is the largest sculpture gallery in Poland. In the Warsaw showroom, located in the revitalized, modern Centrum Praskie Koneser, we have created a unique place to present works and organize exhibitions.
Then, along with Barkley’s Saint Sebastian, the site has other representations of the saint:
by Antonello da Messina, Guido Reni. Andre Mantegna, El Greco, Gerrit van Honthorst, Ángel Zárraga, Lubomir Wojciech Tomaszewski
Plus something completely different from these, but up there with all those Pierre et Gilles concoctions:
(#6) The … gay … Mexican artist Felix d’Eon depicts a saint with brown skin and a massive, sensual body in The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian. The floral frame adds charm.
(On d’Eon, see my 2/17/17 posting “Felix d’Eon: on normalizing gay”)
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