Dear Shaded Viewers,
Paul P.’s work has long occupied a quietly radical space within contemporary painting—one where intimacy, memory, and queer history are rendered with a disarming lightness. Emerging in the late 1990s out of Toronto’s artist-run culture, he became associated with a generation of painters who reintroduced figuration through a deeply personal, often diaristic lens. His early portraits, drawn from found photographs and fragments of gay visual culture, resist both nostalgia and spectacle. Instead, they hover in a suspended emotional register—at once tender, elusive, and unresolved.
This sensibility has remained remarkably consistent even as his practice has expanded in scale and atmosphere. Whether depicting languid male figures, spectral interiors, or fleeting landscapes, Paul P. approaches painting as a form of poetic reconstruction. His surfaces feel breathed rather than built, with thin washes and muted palettes that evoke both fragility and persistence. There is always the sense that something is slipping away—time, desire, or the image itself.
The recent publication of Paul P., a monograph released by Maureen Paley in collaboration with Gregory R. Miller & Company and Greene Naftali, offers a timely reflection on this trajectory. More than a survey, it situates his work within a broader lineage of romanticism and queer visuality, tracing how his paintings operate as both personal reverie and cultural archaeology.
Institutional recognition has steadily followed. In 2023, the National Gallery of Canada presented Amor et Mors, a title that encapsulates the artist’s enduring preoccupation with love and mortality. This was preceded by Early Skirmishes at Hordaland Kunstsenter in Bergen, which revisited formative moments in his practice. More recently, his inclusion in Ruins of Rooms: Jimmy DeSana and Paul P. at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin (2024) underscored a dialogue between photography and painting, past and present—two of his watercolours from that exhibition now appearing in The Fugitive Marvels of Sunset.
His exhibition history reveals a practice that moves fluidly between intimate gallery settings and larger institutional frameworks. From Sibilant Esses at Greene Naftali in New York to Vespertilians in London and Ambiguous Mouths in Brescia, each presentation refines his exploration of atmosphere and gesture. His most recent exhibition, Snapping Off, Judy’s Death at Sans Titre in Paris (2026), continues this trajectory, suggesting a further stripping down of narrative in favor of tonal and emotional nuance.
Paul P.’s work has also been consistently embedded within important group exhibitions, from the Whitney Biennial (2014) to earlier presentations at MoMA and more recent projects in Berlin and Los Angeles. His paintings are now held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Hammer Museum, and the National Gallery of Canada, affirming his position within an international canon while maintaining the distinctly intimate quality that defines his practice.
What remains most compelling, however, is the way his paintings resist resolution. They do not declare; they suggest. In an era often driven by immediacy and clarity, Paul P. continues to cultivate ambiguity as a form of resistance—inviting viewers not to consume the image, but to dwell within it.
Later,
Diane
Maureen Paley, 60 Three Colts Lane
