COOPER COLE is pleased to present a solo presentation of Canadian artist Paul P. for Art Basel’s online fair, OVR: Portals.

Paul P.’s portraits are images appropriated from gay erotic magazines, specifically those produced in the years bracketed by the beginning of gay liberation and the advent of the AIDS crisis; a period of provisional freedoms. The models originate from the explicit material of desire, spectral and Janus-like, looking forwards and backwards in time; back to transient wellsprings of homosexual aesthetics and innuendo, and forwards to AIDS and other future tragedies, wherein aesthetic energy may lose or regain its unruly value. Other works, hovering between genres of landscape and abstraction, are extractions of architectural scenes of neighbourhoods in Venice, Italy. The paintings describe laundry hung to dry along coloured stucco alleys, bed sheets moving in the breeze; devices for further picturing ephemerality and erotics, in a city central to the history of innuendo.