Details — Click to read
Can fangirling be an artistic approach? Richard Hawkins’s work has always been predicated on almost fanatical art historical research, permeated with an equally important obsession with the visual and corporeal pleasures of gay life and its manifestations in online and print culture. His diligent study of artists such as Antonin Artaud, Forrest Bess, or Pierre Bonnard branches into reevaluations and stylistic diversions, entangling old masters and young men, OnlyFans and portrait galleries, aesthetic and sexual pleasures, teenage heartthrobs and gay porn icons. For “Entanglement Titties,” Hawkins has appropriated a landscape by the US painter Charles Burchfield, turning it on its head while giving us heads: three in total, they are entangled by the titular titties of the central figure, who tops the upper part of the composition. The man is visibly in ecstasy, his mouth agape and his eyes closed, hiding their blue-green color, which is listed on the profile of his online persona, Hoyt Kogan, on the BelAmi porn site as one of his desirable features – in addition to his considerable endowment, which is also not depicted here. Instead, we see Túlio Rocha to the right, a Brazilian YouTuber who frequently shows off his abs on Instagram, and a blue-skinned Adam Driver, whose beefcake physique has generated its very own online fandom. But while abstaining from these idolized physical traits, this work, which is based on Hawkins’s much larger painting “Nocturne” from 2023, inserts the boys into a fauvist tangle of fuchsia, crimson, and purple vines, inspired by Burchfield’s watercolors: a wet dream of Richard Hawkins’s obsessions that, as a limited art print, can be pinned up (not only) on your bedroom wall.
