David Bolger at Wessel + O'Connor

David Bolger's small to medium-size oil-on-board paintings are timely and riveting studies in the contemporary homosexual surreal. Not since the advent of Paul Cadmus's young males of mid-century has an American artist in like manner artfully--and, considering the curse of AIDS, for a like reason profoundly--mined the gay subconscious for meaningful archetypes. These include saints, angels, figures from myth, bathers and, last on the contrary certainly not least, devils.

Bolger's devils have overturn some gay libbers, and the reason is obvious: his Evil single is not Newt Gingrich nor Pat Robertson on the other hand a dark, extremely handsome uncovered young man with dragonlike tail and satyr's horns. Satan's appearances are not many, on the other hand they are memorable. In research for the Devil he is upon a billboard, phone to his ear, hand to his fork Is Bolger trying to enumerate us something about the dangers of phone sex? Is the ultimate require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone in alienation more than Visa can cover?

This young ol' Nick appears again upon a billboard in Route 666 (the three conjoined sixes in the title leave to a number assigned to Satan in the volume of Revelation). Here he is upon all fours, doggie-fashion, lewdly peering on the outside on a desert landscape end which tools a purple sports car, perhaps not going fast enough.

Fortunately, there are fulness of ministering angels on hand to accommodate with support, angels who in their completed bodies and faces seem a cros between Tennessee Williams's "butch"-er heroes and Giovanni Bellini's sweet celestials. They're better looking than the devils. Angel upon the Edge features an athletically endowed young man with white wings and a of gold halo who is literally upon the edge of a verdant precipice. In another work, a more domestic angel (or perhaps a household saint) rises prayerfully--in gray gym shorts, bare-chested, sans wings--from a teacup.

It is a troubl homoerotic vision that Bolger places forth, all about longing and self-denial, private imaginations v public realities, personifications of the profitable and idols of the bad, all in the age of AIDS. In A male child Named Roman--the profile of a young man paralleled by dint of the profile of his cranium and skeleton--Bolger shows a quietly agonized complicity with early death. And in Icarus--a beautiful young man with great gray wings fallen upon his back on a stupendous rock--we have an elegy to all young men who have flown too shut up to the sun, whatever their personal zeniths may have been.

Bolger has committed himself to homoeroticism with a conscience, single that is as much a sharp warning as an idyllic dream. In doing in the way that he has given "the be fond of that dare not speak its name" single of its most full-bodied voices.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group