Textile artist Paolo Arao explores queerness through his materials, line work, titles, and forms in his show A Selection of Recent Works at David B. Smith Gallery in Denver.
Paolo Arao: A Selection of Recent Works
March 10—April 8, 2023
David B. Smith Gallery, Denver
Brooklyn-based and Philippine-born artist Paolo Arao creates two-dimensional textile paintings trafficking in colorful, geometric abstraction. His current show A Selection of Recent Works, his second in David B. Smith Gallery’s project room, displays a representative body of his practice.
Arao, a current MacDowell fellow whose work has shown in the Columbus Museum of Art and the Everson Museum of Art, has previously noted that his artwork fosters a “queer dynamic” predicated upon “shift spacing.” The paintings featured in Recent Works are no exception.
Take, for instance, Sunset Boulevard (2019). The artwork contains swatches of orange, black, and pink cotton and corduroy stretched over a fifty-four by forty-five-inch frame, which is attached to its bars with a canvas backing. Due to the elasticity of the fabric, the stitched lines between swatches bend and warp as they are pulled both horizontally and vertically from the stretching process.
The wavering of Sunset Boulevard’s lines recalls Sara Ahmed’s book Queer Phenomenology, in which she writes: “The question is not so much finding a queer line but rather asking what our orientation toward queer moments of deviation will be. If the objects slip away, if its face becomes inverted, if it looks odd, strange, or out of place, what will we do?”
To this extent, Arao’s work doesn’t so much contain a “queer line,” rather, it acts as an invitation to an audience to become queer, to accept queerness, or to engage queerly when confronted with a line that deviates from the hard-edged (i.e. straight, in all of its connotations) abstraction from which it swerves.
Of course, it is not just the line work of Arao’s paintings that gesture toward a “queer dynamic.” The titles and shapes of his artworks serve to amplify this purpose as well: particularly his two textile paintings Frottage and Block Party (both 2021).
In art, frottage refers to a process of creating an image by rubbing. It can also describe the “practice of rubbing against the clothed body of another person in a crowd as a means of obtaining sexual gratification.” To this extent, one could read these pieces to be in conversation with one another as a diptych of public, yet surreptitious sexual arousal.
But within gay and queer culture, frottage (or frotting) refers to non-penetrative penis-to-penis contact. And, at the towering dimensions of eight-four by nine inches, both Frottage and Block Party are nothing if not two massive, vibrantly patch-worked phalluses hung upon the walls of David B. Smith’s project room. Moreover, the artworks’ face-to-face placement on opposing walls suggest two erections on the precipice of touching in a moment of homoerotic pleasure. Indeed, these artworks—and the others in A Selection of Recent Works—allow viewers to bear witness to queer lines, aesthetics, and sexuality.
