3 May 2023 |
Perhaps because Alex Foxton, the British painter who lives in Paris, first began his creative profession designing against the obstructions of the retail cycle, he now creates work in serial form. Whereas many artists are plagued by their subjects for years and decades at a time—some even their whole lives—Foxton confronts his in intense bursts of study and gaudy shrouds of color before moving onto the next. Touring me around Kapp Kapp gallery in New York, the former Dior designer explains how his debut art exhibition in the U.S. was conceived specifically for the TriBeCa space, a two-room loft where the his striking oil paintings of the male form encounter archive images of the same matter from the photographer Stanley Stellar.
On one wall a binded male torso by Foxton, Alan Lynes, 2023, squats on the fuchsia soils of an abstracted Hudson River. Frozen in a statuesque form, the figure’s profile is nearly blown out by a severe moonlight glare, and its gaze is held by an unknown passerby. Beside it is a photograph by Stellar of the muralist Tava Von Wills in the same field of hyper-saturation. Created decades apart, both works fixate on the same slice of the city and its broader cultural implications; a shared dialogue dissected by time. Across the room is Tava Von Wills, 2023, Foxton’s present day interpretation of the same Austrian artist, etched in glowing red acrylic paint and backlit by shapes inspired by Von Wills’ own work. At the center of the space—where the passageway narrows and the hallway seems to swallow you in hole—Foxton lowers what’s left of his guard: his figures’ faces seep further into the darkness joyously exhibiting their bodies to whomever’s delight. Such is the experience of “Sunshower (after Stanley Stellar),” a cumulative game of telephone between the past and the present, the real and the reimagined.
Of course, Stellar, who lives just a few blocks west of Kapp Kapp, has been documenting New Yorkers—specifically gay, male, New Yorkers—his whole life. He picked up his first camera as a young boy, but it wasn’t until the mid-’70s that he finally grasped what he had always been searching for: gay freedom. Blissfully raw, the photographer’s candid images of bare chested men licking their lips and thrusting their limbs—on the streets of Manhattan’s West Village, the cruise-y Christopher Street pier, the unknown underground—enshrine a lost utopia, one that was preserved from hate, sadness, and the nearing AIDS crisis if only for a moment in time. Seductive and emotional, there is a uniquely New York experience to viewing Stellar’s photography. More than a scenic backdrop, the urban landscape, with its grit and glamor, is a finite capsule of his time; a boiling point between the incessant chase of the American Dream and the country’s repression of its innermost desires.
When I ask Foxton what exactly drew an English abstractionist to an American erotic documentarian he tells me he was taken by the confidence that Stellar views the world around him. “The way he approaches his subjects… there’s no parallel for that,” the painter says, gesturing toward another photograph by Stellar of two nude men, one sunbathing in full savasana while the other slides his fist up and down bringing his companion to orgasm. “Britain is all about being hidden in enclosed space,” says Foxton. “Whereas Stanely shows us a paradise.” And indeed there is a paradiscal feeling to the new paintings at Kapp Kapp, like the fiery Piers Roof, July 1978, 2023 and the carefree Robert Pedantic, 2023, of which Foxton has rendered both figures in states of rejoice: as one man pulls off his shirt, the other lays his head to twirl.
But to take inspiration from is very different than having a conversation with—and yet somehow Foxton’s works in this show do both. “I needed to deal with male desire and with gay history,” explains the painter, who admits the topics have been oblique in his past series. As such, these works by the painter are probably his gayest yet. They also act as a preamble to his second show in the U.S., “Trade,” which will open at Various Small Fires in L.A. next month. Ahead of the opening of “Sunshower (after Stanley Stellar),” this past weekend, the photographer invited the painter over to his long-time TriBeCa home. After months of digital communication it was a beautiful reckoning for the two artists to meet in real life. “He took my photo, too,” smiles Foxton. “And in that moment it clicked. Everything I thought or didn’t understand about him made total sense. It was beautiful.”
