Paul P.
Éric Simon

An important age
03.11–04.17.2004
Room 2

In Gallery 2, CLARK presents the work of Eric Simon (Montreal) and Paul P. (Toronto), two artists exploring the genre of portraiture in their practices.

The drawings and watercolours of Paul P. depict the faces of young men, drawn from gay pornography of the 1970’s and 1980’s. This series of portraits of “forgotten little porn stars” constitutes, for the artist, a kind of archive, reviving the memory of a period that was heavily impacted by the AIDS pandemic. Moreover, these representations of men in their flower, take us back to issues of the passage of time, the flight of youth and the loss of innocence. Lending his attention to the gaze of his subjects, Paul P. transmits through his work the states of confusion, desire, ecstasy and abandon that accompany one’s earliest sexual experiences. Offering a variety of tones of pink, the sugary colouration of many of these images underlines their erotic connotations while simultaneously evoking the puerile candor of inexperience.

The passage of time also constitutes an important motif in the artistic production of Eric Simon. For over twenty years, Simon has made pencil self-portraits on paper. At CLARK he presents an installation bringing together more than 200 of these self-portraits. Faced with this colossal work, the viewer will be tempted to reconstitute the movement of time and to follow the marks of its passing, all while being unable to do so. In fact, rather than trying to faithfully reproduce his image, the artist amused himself by lightly transforming his features, thinning out his profile here, remodeling the shape of his nose, or the squareness of his jaw. The accumulation of all these images of the same model, who is never quite the same, questions, with a certain humour, the notions of identity, of perception and of self-image.

NdeB. translated by PduB.