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.
