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With Caravaggio’s departure from the Capital after a blockbuster show at the National Gallery, Ottawa now gets a look at the work of his homocultural descendant with James Huctwith’s Memory Night exhibit at La Petite Mort Gallery.

“The problem with being gay is the problem of individuality,” the painter muses, reached in his Toronto studio in advance of his dark, sexual solo show. He came up with the subjects of the series while mired in bed undergoing a harsh medical treatment, and what emerged are images that speak to the “mystery and ambiguity” of his life as an HIV-positive, out gay artist.

Raised in the “middle of nowhere” in rural Ontario to Protestant fundamentalist parents, Huctwith learned the hard way that gay artists are born into opposition to the straight world’s “primitive superstitious cruelty.” As a teen, James would lock himself in the bathroom with a pencil and paper and draw Tom of Finland-esque hunky men with big dicks “because it was fantasy material.” When he came out to his parents, the head of his church sat him down and told him that God would kill him, “with AIDS or otherwise,” which precipitated him having to leave his hamlet virtually overnight to escape the stigma. Like many country-born queers, he fled to the big city for art school, but admits to wondering if he ever recovered from the traumatic alienation he suffered as a teen.

Hence the saints, martyrs, and noblemen of Renaissance imagery give way to hustlers, leather daddies, and lasciviously tortured men in Huctwith’s art.  In The Land of Milk and Honey, the smiling subject is like a Rembrandt take on a Cazzo porn star; Roadside (also from 2011) is more indebted to the “rich mysteries” of a Caravaggist, but with a da Vinci-like Madonna and Child hidden in the shadows. Huctwith deliberately ascribes to the painterly tradition of the Western canon, but inserts the perverse characters of his own gay pantheon, as a kind of vindication.

“As gay people we are made to conform to things that we do not understand. By the time we finish childhood, we have already been so accommodating to things that straight people never have to deal with, massively compromised about who we are and what we like/want,” he asserts, speaking so much more like an activist than an oil painter.

“We have already given too much. There is nothing more to concede.”

James Huctwith’s Memory Night shows at La Petite Mort Gallery, Nov 4-27, 2011
306 Cumberland Street, Ottawa, ON

www.lapetitemortgallery.com

www.jameshuctwith.ca