I was walking through the streets of Paris one rainy afternoon, when I came across a plaque commemorating the spot where the last homosexual couple were tortured, burned alive and their ashes scattered to the wind. This solitary moment became the impetus for a series of drawings, and prints, that led to the creation of a pair of sculptural altarpieces paying tribute to the charcutier Jean Diot and his lover the cobbler Bruno Lenoir. This work is paired with Pentimento 15 (Bruno Lenoir).
This work is paired with Pentimento 16 (Jean Diot). I work intuitively to create forms that cobble together stories that are often overlooked or purposefully forgotten. In the case of both Pentimento 15 and 16, there are two different silkscreen prints of sensual male bodies. An artist’s model, whose face is obscured by a rigid structure that is both a phallus, and an obstacle.
I was thinking about the tradition of wedding portraits made to commemorate couples across cultures and throughout history. This pair of portrait altars, serves to commemorate a pair of lovers. That sort of celebration seemed more compelling to me, than a lonely plaque marking the site of their murder by their neighbors in 18th century Paris.
Reflecting upon my foster brother who I lost touch with. I went to the site of our early youth (Camden, New Jersey), and retrieved a fragment of the crumbling street that I then gilded, and placed like a relic within an oak altar form, a print of the only image I have of the two of us as children, a ceramic form, cast, glazed cracked and repaired with gold and lacquer in the Japanese tradition of kintsugi; when a state of brokenness is repaired with precious metals, our flaws cherished and celebrated.
