Oblique Strategies: Queer Opacity in Figurative Painting

Abstract

This practice-led investigation explores concealment as a queer strategy in figurative painting. The studio research consists of a body of paintings in which discernible pictorial and conceptual veils hide queer desire in plain view. It is underpinned by critical theory that proposes opacity as an alternative to absolute visibility. Cultural theorists Nicholas de Villiers and Clare Birchall are exemplary scholars engaging in the field of opaque politics, which informs my own theoretical framework.

My studio methodology engages modes associated with the still life genre, wherein assemblages of objects and props are staged in cryptic configurations and painted from observation. Motifs such as curtains, cloaks and apertures, containing obscured figures, represent conspicuous visual obstructions. An artist's lay figure is employed in several paintings, and its disguised presence is mined for symbolism. These apparent concealments augment the work's conceptual obfuscations wherein narrative ambiguity, compositional schisms and occult hieroglyphs signify the withholding of salient information and engender layers of visual intrigue. Complementarily, the painted surface, with its slow accumulation of differentiated brushstrokes, enacts a distinct material opacity.

In addition to the genre of still life, the project draws upon a range of historical figurative modes of painting in which symbolic motifs simultaneously evoke and camouflage themes of desire. The work of American artist George Tooker is one key historical precedent for my project, as his latently homoerotic and conceptually ambiguous paintings are viewed as a model for queer opacity. Other notable influences on my practice include the Pittura Metafisica of Greek-born Giorgio de Chirico and the Surrealist provocations of Belgian artist Rene Magritte. The variety of historical and contemporary forms suffusing this doctoral study contributes to a sense of bricolage that is a key characteristic of the creative work. In this regard, the collision of diverse elements within the studio research engenders a visual multiplicity and staged convolution that produces a queer aesthetic in painting resistant to the totalising effects of a normative visibility politics. Show more