Larry Stanton’s Lost Men

It’s impossible to examine Larry Stanton’s work without having the spectre of AIDS front of mind. Curated by the late artist’s estate and installed across four rooms of APALLAZZOGALLERY, ‘IMAGES’ presents the first substantial global overview of Stanton’s practice, which teems with urgent lust and whimsy style. Alongside personal mementos of queer intimacy, the show is further contextualized by insights into the artist’s friendship with British painter David Hockney, positioning his works within the art-historical framework of the Western gay canon.

Inside the first room, two sketches of young men, Untitled (1981) and Untitled (1978), set the tone for the show, their soft, unmarked faces characterized only by the dainty fold of a flannel shirt collar or a patch of hairs between the brows. Next door, colour portraits in preppy primaries feature boys – lovers and friends, occasionally named with a scribble – with rouged cheeks (Two Men, undated) or mid-snooze (Philip, 1983). The sitters exude a sensibility that sits somewhere between restlessness and languor. Where smooth complexions betray little about their character, ruffled tresses of hair step in, signalling the youth and optimism of a personality in formation – albeit one perhaps never fully realized. More than half of the men in the show, including Stanton, notes estate co-founder Fabio Cherstich, had their lives cut short.

In this vein, Stanton's Self-portrait (undated) presents him at his aesthetic peak: hair like spun gold and cerulean eyes fixed on the viewer. Undoubtedly aware of his conventional beauty, the artist indulged his looks and libido alike, embracing the sex-positive attitude typical to 1970s gay liberation. That horny undercurrent finds its pinnacle in BOY (undated), a suggestive Super8 film that sees a smiley, floppy-locked hustler posing in tighty-whities as the camera zooms in on his extraordinary bulge. In the background, an exhibition playlist of disco hits selected by critic Vince Aletti wails out, recalling a pre-AIDS gay bar. Chiming with APALLAZZOGALLERY’s cherub-lined ceiling and gilt mirrors, the space is a vision of camp on the brink of epidemic catastrophe.

In the third room, another Super8 video, Fort Lauderdale, Florida (c.1975), sees Stanton hone in on a swimming clinic, cruising the Adonis-like bodies as they adjust their swimming briefs or practise somersaults from the diving board. This ogling is offset by David Hockney at Ken Tyler Graphics (1978), a rare documentation of Hockney making his ‘Paper Pools’ series spliced with B-roll of pool surfaces and interactions with curator Henry Geldzahler. Prima facie, the montage feels random, but it helps situate Stanton – who didn’t achieved major art-world recognition until 2018, when Cherstich discovered his practice – within a wider rubric of gay figurative painting.

It also explains the prevalence of pools – a motif Hockney himself loaded with homoerotic meaning: bared skin, flexed bodies, eased inhibitions. This coding unravels in the fourth room, where ephemeral photographs of ferries arriving at Fire Island Pines – brimming with drag queens, jubilant gays and beachy twinks – are displayed in a vitrine. On the walls, voyeuristic diptychs from the swim clinic, snapshots of Stanton’s travels and photographs of Hockney at work encapsulate the show’s uniquely queer temporality.

Seething with desire and a jouissance that colours precious moments – be it long summer frolics in the Pines or a New York hook-up – Stanton’s works invoke a way of being that’s both the result of the fundamental lifestyle differences that accompanied being openly gay and a looming, viral threat to that newfound right. As queer portraiture enjoys a revival more broadly, ‘IMAGES’ mainlines virility and homosocial tenderness as foils to abject mementos of the crisis, granting Stanton the fame he so craved whilst validating a once-derided medium.

Larry Stanton’s ‘Images’ is on view at Apalazzo Gallery, Brescia, until 6 January 2025

_{Main image: Larry Stanton, ‘Images’, 2024, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Apalazzo Gallery; photograph: Melania Della Grava / DSL Studio}