A surprise on my Pinterest this morning: a sinesagittal St. Sebastian from Texan artist RF. Alvarez (who offers tender, communal gay machismo, which is Tex-Mex to boot):
(#1) Alvarez, St. Sebastian (2022), aka “Meet me under the pomegranate tree, St. Sebastian” (a self-portrait of the strikingly handsome RFA in the St. Sebastian pose, with a vulnerable but unharmed body, and steadily meeting the viewers’ gaze, conveying neither agony nor ecstasy); the figure here is hooking up with St. Sebastian, and he’s also mirroring St. Sebastian (with his hands behind his back, perhaps tied to a tree, only a bit of drapery barely covering his genitals)
But why a pomegranate tree (not part of Christian legend)? And the deep orange suffusing the figure’s entire body and filling all the background behind him and the tree — another pomegranate allusion (though pomegranate fruits and juice are garnet-red, not citrus-orange)? An allusion to the Greek myth of Persephone and her pomegranate seeds?
I’ve now looked at quite a lot of RFA’s paintings, and this one stands out from all the others, including his other self-portraits (for instance, Self-Portrait with Grandfather’s Hat (2023)). So it cries out for some explication.
A note on Persephone. From the Wikipedia entry on pomegranates:
The Greeks were familiar with the fruit far before it was introduced to Rome via Carthage, and it figures in multiple myths and artworks. In Ancient Greek mythology, the pomegranate was known as the “fruit of the dead”, and believed to have sprung from the blood of Adonis.
The myth of Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, prominently features her consumption of pomegranate seeds, requiring her to spend a certain number of months in the underworld every year. The number of seeds and therefore months vary. During the months that Persephone sits on the throne of the underworld beside her husband Hades, her mother Demeter mourns and no longer gives fertility to the earth. This was an ancient Greek explanation for the seasons.
Two representative works by RFA. His own statement about his work, from the About page of his website:
Alvarez [born 1988 in San Antonio TX] is an artist based in Austin, Texas. His figurative paintings are characterized by nocturnal color pallets and evocative scenes that blend personal memory with romantic allegory. Using a process of dry-brushing [acrylic] paint onto raw linen – and borrowing stylistic techniques from Old Masters – Alvarez creates luminous images of queer joy, revelry and contemplation; countering a historical narrative of queer alienation and erasure in the American West. With family roots in both Texas and Mexico, Alvarez uses visions of friendship, indulgence and tenderness to juxtapose with Southern machismo – illuminating the vulnerability that can hide beneath the steely façade of masculinity and the societies it creates.
A loving male couple. Of cowboys:
(#2) Alvarez, The Partner (2024)
A group scene. In this case, of same-sex couples:
(#3) Alvarez, A Dinner for Lovers (2024)
A longer story. The beginning of a Texas Monthly story, “A Painter Uses the Techniques of an Old Master to Depict Texas in a New Light: The gay son of an immigrant and part of a multigenerational ranching family, RF. Alvarez blends traditional iconography with queer identity” by Paul L. Underwood on 9/3/24:
This month in London, two men from Texas will look across the room towards one another. The distance between them will only be a few feet, but it will also span generations.
The first man, an aging rancher whose face is shadowed by a cowboy hat, looks behind him, uncertainty in his eyes. The second man, unclothed and youthful, wears a mournful expression as he crouches on the floor, held by his male lover, who’s also naked and perched on a bed. Taken together, they’re a portrait of change — in a family, in types of manhood, and in Texas itself. The first a creature of the old ways, the second a symbol of the new, uncertain whether his forefathers have room in their land and in their hearts for men like him.
The two men, who appear in separate paintings, are in reality one and the same: RF. Alvaez, an Austin-based artist who specializes in intricate, Renaissance-style portraiture, and who has become a darling of the international art circuit. At his upcoming solo show, “The Look Back” (also the name of the second painting of the nudes) at Taymour Grahne Projects in London, many of the works depict Alvarez, his husband [Chase Calvert], and his friends with a startling and sensual intimacy.
Alvarez, who goes by Robert, has a story that embodies twenty-first century Texas. On his mother’s side, he is descended from six or seven generations of cattle ranchers (he’s lost count) from Cuero, Texas, including the grandfather who inspired the self-portrait. (That’s his Resistol on Alvarez’s head in the painting, deepening the connection between them and between the men and Texas lore.) His father is an immigrant from Mexico. Alvarez often explores and subverts the image of the cowboy, capturing the hard-won pleasures of vaquero life, alongside the loneliness of the desperado, with a queer subtext that is impossible to miss. The end results are dreamy and cinematic, low-lit and evocative, a sort of inverse of Edward Hopper’s lonely urbanites. Alvarez’s subjects might be longing to connect, but they are rarely alone. Even the aging rancher has a calf by his side.
(#4) RF. Alvarez and his art (photo by Mackenzie Smith Kelley for Texas Monthly)The artist achieves this effect through an Old World technique that he says he “stole” from the Italian tenebrist painter Caravaggio, one that emphasizes spare lighting to create intense drama in even the most ordinary scenes, like a group of friends gathered over drinks at a bar. “The overriding thing that I’ve always found very attractive about his work is this particular use of light,” says Nick Campbell, director of the Austin-based Campbell Art Advisory and Campbell Art Collective. “I’ve spoken to him at length about Caravaggio’s impression upon him. He was the absolute master at creating these scenarios where everything was illuminated by this one particular light source. And so, Robert is doing that in such an interesting and modern way, putting individuals in everyday scenarios on a very subtle pedestal.”
A bit about the “tenebrist painter” in my 5/8/11 posting “Caravaggio”.
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