I ring the buzzer three, maybe four times at 725 N. Western. No one answers. While I debate whether to abandon my mission, a man with a ladder leaves a side gate open and I slip in. Wandering through a courtyard, I find Hannah Hoffman tucked in the back. This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibition at its new space, an addition to the Melrose Hill pile-on. Upon entering, I am greeted by an intimate room; sisal carpeting and dim light from two orbs create a cocooned, if sparse, domestic space. A single humble Paul Thek painting awaits me.
“Untitled (rooftops), 1987” is both the name of the show and its sole painting. Less a performatively empty space than a meditation on one painting, the show is understated but direct. I am immediately somatically at ease. Hung nice and low, and perpetually in shadow, this intimately scaled painting depicts the view of the East Village skyline from Thek’s apartment window. Energetically washy and loose, a moody sky in pepto bismol and blue sits atop a golden-hour cityscape, buildings tightening into short flick-of-the-wrist strokes. Despite, or rather in contrast to, the acrylic with which it’s painted, there’s a distinctly old-world European quality to the painting. This East Village could be Paris or Rome.
Paul Thek was a true flaneur, wandering around Europe in the ’60s and ’70s, consorting with the likes of Tennessee Williams and Susan Sontag, picking up odd jobs. Thek was also notably a lapsed Catholic, although perhaps aspirationally devout, in a uniquely tormented gay Catholic way. His work reveals a reverence for and a deep knowledge of spiritual questions in Catholicism, and of its vast well of ephemera, symbology and architecture. In this light, I experience “Untitled (rooftops), 1987” religiously, as if entering a chapel, a devotional effect created by the low lighting and the single painting. There’s a preciousness to the painting because of its isolation; it functions as a sort of shrine. This is not unique to this painting: Thek’s seminal series Technological Reliquaries features beeswax body parts and meat encased in Plexiglas. While he was in Italy, Thek became interested in folk relics and saints’ festivals, which shaped many of his late 1960s sculptures and installations. Thek’s work is by nature eclectic and free, but he always returns to the spiritual.
As a first show, Hannah Hoffman’s Thek exhibition bravely asserts an understated stillness. I can’t imagine this show will bring in crowds—even if they could find their way past buzzer and iron gates. A show with one painting is gutsy. I can’t blame Hannah Hoffman for showing only this one as the other cityscapes Thek made around the time aren’t, for the most part, very good. He is by no means a great painter. His paintings are hit or miss. Counterintuitively, that is part of the appeal. Thek takes big swings, unconcerned by questions of reception, taste or consistency. Untitled (rooftops) is great precisely because of its casual tastelessness. The colors are delightfully garish. There’s something amateurish or vernacular to both the mode of painting and the subject matter. Unlike much of Thek’s late-career paintings that embrace naivete, going so far as to be hung at the eye level of a child, this painting has a maturity, but one that is painted rather haphazardly and is underhandedly traditional in scope.
Paul Thek, Untitled (rooftops), 1987. Courtesy of Hannah Hoffman.
It’s all in the color competition between the yellow and purple. The dynamic between these complementary colors (according to the traditional RYB color model), perfectly split down the middle, creates a tension of taste. The shadows are also in complementary colors of indigo and sharp cheddar-cheese orange. While theoretically scientifically pleasing, Thek’s formulation has a too-muchness to it.
Untitled (rooftops) was made while Thek was dying of AIDS in his East Village apartment. His subject matter is thus limited to his immediate surroundings. A problem arises around how much we allow context to seep into our reading of the work. I have competing desires about whether or not to romanticize this painting’s timing. The image of Thek on the eve of his deathbed, staring out of his West Village apartment, makes for a sentimental and melodramatic reading of this painting as reflective of the agony and ecstasy of a life’s sunset. I don’t see this impulse as disrespectful, but rather perhaps too easy and teleological. Would this be a good painting under different conditions? Perhaps this is an unaskable question: off-limits.
In 1981, in response to his sculpture The Tomb, Thek said, “Imagine having to bury yourself over and over.” Does Thek deserve to be buried once more? Beyond the formal appeal of this painting’s tastelessness, its transcendent quality exists in the interplay of presence and absence. There’s a saintly quality—a martyrdom—to Thek, or to any artist who dies of AIDS. The act of conflating the biography with the actual work becomes a guilty pleasure. This type of analysis—fetishization of an artist’s death to AIDS—flatters both artist and reviewer. In this case, Thek’s biography packages the chaos that is his oeuvre. The single painting becomes a stand-in for both his body and a window much like Thek’s own.
We’ll allow the biographical to the extent that it is also formal: Untitled (rooftops) has a Rear Window quality of escape from confinement by binocular focus on the window’s contents. In direct opposition to the voyeurism of Hitchcock, Thek exhibits a sense of awe and optimism about the world. Instead of the dark underbelly of New York that Hitchcock examines, Thek exposes the light, and instead of human drama, Thek looks at the sublime drama of the skyline. Because death is coming from within, the beyond is allowed to be beautiful.
