In addition to her Bethnal Green location, iconic gallerist Maureen Paley has a second space located at Rochelle School, a hub for creative companies. Studio M currently features an exhibition of stunning watercolours by genius painter Paul P. whose work are already in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

The watercolours depict envisioned scenes of flying bats, a metaphoric motif for homosexual desire. The animals float within atmospheres that also recall the tonal harmonies and colour arrangements of James McNeill Whistler’s paintings. Through these pastel-toned arrangements, the artist draws on melancholic characteristics from the turn of the twentieth century.

“Their point of origin was as a reference to the symbolist poet Comte Robert de Montesquiou (on whom Huysmans modelled the fictional character des Esseintes, and Proust his Baron de Charlus) who adopted ‘the nocturnal bird’, as he liked to call it, as an emblem of his rarefied self, an esoteric symbol of homosexuality in an era of criminalised desire…Between bird and animal, appearing at dusk and through the night, existing upside down/inverted, vilified and feared, the bat continues to hold as a metaphor for dexterity, elegance, otherness, and unshakable stigma” Paul P. explains.

These Vespertilian landscapes, lending the title to the show, face a selection of paintings depicting intimately cropped portraits of boys, projecting ambiguous glances from semi-abstract settings. The portraits are appropriated from gay erotic material published from the 1960s to the early 80s, a microcosm of time bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the HIV/AIDS crisis. Rather than existing as a direct representation of these figures, the works appear as subtle allegories expressing a feeling or impulse of their queer symbology that reflects aestheticism, the transience of youth and the recurrence of cultural tragedy.

The small-sized works are simply poetic, beautiful and full of energy. They demonstrate the artist’s brilliant palette and remarkable ability to convey emotions through subtle and mastered brushstrokes.

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