Ambiguous Mouths

When I first came across the title Ambiguous Mouths, I immediately thought of a threshold: a mouth, suspended between words and silence, between eroticism and expectation. This is where, I believe, Paul P.’s painting fits in: this sort of intermediate space where ambiguity does not mean uncertainty, but strategy and posture.

This is not the first time P. gives a title a performative role. With the exhibition Sibilant Esses held in New York in 2024, he had already transformed sibilance into aesthetic matter, turning on its head the queer stereotype —the effeminate voice—to transform it into a poetic device. With Ambiguous Mouths, the shift is even wider: from phonetic emphasis to the entire mouth, which is at once the seat of the voice and of desire, the threshold between language and secrecy. As a theatre director, used to treating titles, sounds and voices as if they were keys capable of opening up new worlds, I recognise in these titles the same function: they anticipate the work, throwing its space wide open.

P.’s conceptual matrix arises from his fascination for queer literature and the decadent movement. Proust, Montesquiou, Baron Corvo, Ronald Firbank, Jocelyn Brooke: these figures transformed style into a battlefield, into a survival code and an instrument of seduction. P. seems to perfectly embody Firbank’s quotation: «I adore italics, don’t you?» (1). Italics as a queer posture, a minimal yet radical deviation, enough to shift the meaning. Likewise, P. bends images: he takes pornographic photographs created for immediate consumption and turns them into enigmatic portraits, suspended apparitions. His paintings work as visual italics: the explicit becomes allusion, the consumable becomes memory.

He draws on gay porn from the 70s and early 80s: magazines, films, eye-catching layouts, saturated colours —a mix of classicism, psychedelia, hippie counterculture, and new wave. The fanzines, self-produced and distributed in independent circuits, were cultural artefacts as well as instruments of desire: each typographical, chromatic and material choice gave birth to a self-regulating imagery. Erotic photographers and publishers engaged in a dialogue with art and cinema, inventing a new realism: lingering on faces and settings, drawing on both the ancient and fin-de-siècle decadence.

The photographs chosen by P. are never random: they come from a specific historical timeline, between the onset of the gay liberation movement and the initial awareness of the AIDS crisis. Thousands of images —from nudist and physique magazines to clandestine pornography— make up a subcultural archive, one of the most intense visual documents portraying the male youth of that time. Yet, P. picks only those faces that already contain in themselves the idea of a painting: he crops them to hide the whole body and to focus on emotional complexity rather than on sexual objectification. The portraits emerge “from the studio as if it were a laboratory” (2): this operation has something theatrical in it, like the gesture of a director who decides what to leave in the shadows and what to illuminate. P.’s crop acts as a director, removing bodies, isolating faces, and guiding the viewer’s gaze. What was once an object becomes a subject of memory and emotion.

His style engages in a continuous dialogue with the history of art, e.g. Whistler, Sargent, etc. not as nostalgic quotations, but as seduction strategies. Glazes, fading palettes, and figures that merge into the background generate suspended apparitions of enchanting beauty, while providing a glimpse into stories about identity. P.’s contradiction is radically contemporary: a glazed painting interrupted by a bright colour, academic drawings side by side with minimal monochromes. There is no mimesis, but an unremitting tension between continuity and dissonance.

Another striking aspect is the artist’s choice to invert hierarchy; he prefers small formats, fragile media like watercolour and pastels, “minor” genres such as intimate portraits and atmospheric landscapes. It is in marginality that he finds a new intensity. Tradition is embraced, but also complicated, distorted, destabilized —like Firbank’s italics.

Portraits and landscapes, side by side. Venice and Venice Beach: two poles, two aquatic and marginal cities, two queer-coded cities. Venice as the literary city par excellence, place of moral dissoluteness and reinvented identity; Venice Beach as the epicentre of gay porn and surf counterculture. Both of them feed the artist’s imagination. P. draws along the canals in Venice en plein air, not depicting a postcard image but an atmosphere: fog, light, humidity. The same qualities emerge from the faces: figures like sunsets, hazy representations, crepuscular presences.

In his paintings, I perceive the same suspension that vibrates in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande: music made of shadows, silences and half-tones that evokes more than it declares. To quote Debussy himself:

«Je me suis servi, tout spontanément d’ailleurs, d’un moyen qui me paraît assez rare, c’est-à-dire du silence […], comme un agent d’expression et peut-être la seule façon de faire valoir l’émotion d’une phrase.» (3)

“I used, quite spontaneously, a means which seems rather rare to me, that is to say silence […], as an agent of expression and perhaps the only way to bring out the emotion of a phrase.”

For him, silence did not mean absence, but expressive matter. Similarly, with P., ambiguity and suspension are not empty, but become active tools: the image lives in the intervals between presence and absence, between Eros and secrecy.

This affinity extends beyond Pelléas et Mélisande. In Préludes, every miniature evokes without telling, letting silence complete the musical phrase. In Clair de lune, fading tones and reflections suggest more than they reveal. Also, in La Mer, movement is created through the use of chiaroscuro and shifting timbres. Accordingly, P.’s figures and gestures appear and withdraw gently, capturing the transience of emotions.

Also Death in Venice by Britten springs to mind: an opera where desire and decorum, eroticism and death coexist in a feverish and suspended atmosphere. In P.’s paintings I see the same restless beauty, where desire never manifests itself directly, but is rather transfigured into an image.

In the end, everything comes together: decadent literature with its oblique language, the pornographic archive transformed into portraiture, the Venetian landscapes filled with ghosts, a work articulated around suspended timelines. Everything converges in Ambiguous Mouths: a mouth that does not state but alludes, seduces without telling, keeps a secret. A queer mouth, organ of language and desire, always walking the tightrope between revelation and mystery.

Fabio Cherstich

Note

1. Paul P., Centaurs on the Beach, in You & i are Earth, Fergus Feehily (Dublino: Paper Visual Art, 2020).
2. Paul P., Final Copy: The Twin Interviews, Francesca Gavin (Copenhagen: At Last Books, 2025).
3. Claude Debussy, Lettera a Ernest Chausson, 2 October 1893, in Correspondance (1872–1918), edited by F. Lesure and D. Herlin, Gallimard, 2005.

Post scriptum

Today, at the opening, I finally saw Paul P.’s works live and I had a long chat with him. A close look at them proved that my intuition was right: a fine dust, reminiscent of face powder, hovers over the surfaces, as if the painted surface was wearing makeup. Paul confirmed that this dimension is part of his research. Paint becomes makeup: a substance that transforms and masks, a cosmetic gesture that shapes identity. It is no coincidence that eyeshadow is often applied with a brush, as painstakingly as an artist would do.  The original images Paul P. uses are black and white Xerox copies. Colour, therefore, does not belong to the original subject; it is an addition, a makeup that covers the faces so that they turn into something else. In this process, subjects seem more alive, but also more fragile and artificial. Even the sky has the texture of powdered skin. The paint becomes epidermis, at once sensual, tactile and perturbing.Watercolours are an exception. The predominant element here is water, which blends and lightens, yet also in this case we can establish a parallel with makeup, in that the colour pans remind us of compact powder cases, and the artist’s gesture dipping his brush is akin to that of the makeup artist blending eyeshadow on an eyelid. Makeup, I told myself, belongs to contrasting rituals. It is a private daily gesture made by somebody who, standing in front of the mirror, tries to redesign their own image, not only to please others, but also to recognize themselves, to find a face that fulfils an inner desire. On the other hand, it is also a public gesture, a social construction, a weapon of seduction and defence. Those who want to be seen, to confuse, or to seek protection under a veil of colour wear makeup.  Makeup covers signs of tiredness, scars, skin blemishes; it is an act of repair, a way to rewrite our body. In Paul P.’s case, makeup seems to act as a second skin that covers the images, giving them a new fragile appearance, as if a latent wound was permanently lying beneath the surface. And then, there is mortuary makeup. It is an intimate and solemn gesture that prepares the dead body for the last encounter with the world. Makeup is applied to the face to preserve the illusion of vitality, to protect the living from the shock of loss, to make the irreversible more acceptable. The cold skin is tinted as if it was still warm, the lips are redefined, powder is dabbed on the cheeks: the last act of love, the last act of fiction. To think of this has allowed me to look at Paul’s paintings from a different angle. Those faces seem to be suspended between appearance and disappearance, as if the makeup covering them was at once a promise of life and a death mask. Though his paintings vibrate with sensuality, they can be taken as an omen of the end. Seeing them with my own eyes was decisive. The reproductions did not convey the vibration of the pigments or the fragility of the surfaces. Paul P. transforms images born in black and white into chromatic bodies, made up presences oscillating between appearance and disappearance. Makeup, I thought as I was leaving, is always an ambivalent act, fragile and reversible, but also extremely powerful. It is defiance and acceptance of time, it is mask and revelation, private intimacy and public spectacle. It is a way to both enter the scene and leave the scene. Perhaps the secret core of Paul P.’s paintings lies right there, in the way in which his made up faces and skies preserve the memory of a life that persists in spite of the certainty that it must come to an end.