The model stands nonchalantly in three-quarters view, arms crossed; hips thrust forward to accentuate the weight of his balls and mildly tumescent cock, eyes focused on nothing in particular, the relaxed, netural expression on his face suggesting unselfconscious acceptance of the artist's gaze, and, by extension, mine. The erotic charge is in my beholder's mind, not in his pose. Or else: the erotic charge is there precisely because, in the presence of my gaze, he appears entirely at home in himself, in his own skin. It's not that I'm stealing a look at him for which I'd be shamed if he recognized it. It's that he shows no anxiety about the possibility of being seen. It's the absence of anxiety that I find sexy. It's my sense of his entitlement to stand thus that calls forth in me a longing that's probably more about wanting to be him than wanting to have him.
Grant (arms crossed), 2000
My long admiration for the work of Montreal artist Daniel Barkley, starting with an exhibit in Toronto in 2007, has always entailed the eroticism of casual nakedness that I experience in so much of it--as also in the work of Thomas Eakins, and in the photography of John Dugdale. But as with Dugdale in particular, that erotic charge is bound up with the layered cultural references and submerged narratives implicit in the work.
A nude man sits backwards in profile in the prow of a dinghy, hands clasped between his thighs, facing a bicycle pointed towards him from the stern. Focusing on a means of conveyance no longer useful? Looking backwards in wistful recollection of the last time he was on land? In denial of the voyage on which he's embarked?--though no means of propulsion is visible, nor anyone who might employ it other than the lone seated figure.
A boy of ten or eleven stands in white briefs in front of an abstract grisaille background, looking self-assuredly off to his right, grasping in both hands the bentwood ribs of a set of canvas wings strapped to his back: an Icarus oblivious to the hazards of rising too confidently into the sky. In other paintings in the series, he stands in profile, just as confident, just as indifferent to the dangers ahead.
In "Road to Bethesda," eleven figures--men, women, a small boy looking forward apprehensively--move through a snow-covered landscape--walking, crawling convulsively, one carried on the back of another, one curled in fetal position on a barrow. In "Ship of Fools I" an infant, adolescents, and adults crowd a narrow boat riding precariously low in the water.
Road to Bethesda, 1997
I'm haunted by Barkley's allegories of mortality in these and other paintings--as in an intergenerational grouping of six male figures portaging yet another boat overhead, barefoot along a rocky shore, three of them hoisting the keel while a prepubescent boy and an old man carry the oars, and the sixth figure trails behind him a length of canvas slung over his shoulder.
Barkley's most recent painting, now on exhibit in Montreal as part of the XL6 exposition at the Maison de la Culture Plateau-Mont-Royal, carries forward motifs that he's long variously explored. A monumental intergenerational grouping of seventeen figures gathers around and upon a rock in shallow water, some nude, some partially dressed, some draped in the translucent plastic that figures in many other paintings as well. A bicycle again cryptically appears in knee-deep water, the man astride it looking off to the right. At the summit of the pyramidal composition a bearded man gazes, with evident longing and perhaps with grief, in the opposite direction, his hands braced against the back of a man whose cheek is pressed against his midriff. Scraps of magenta plastic float surrealistically in front of a boy who, alone among the grouping, looks directly toward the viewer.
Déluge magenta, 2023
Here as in Barkley's earlier work, I'm summoned to witness his implicit juxtapositions of eros and death, these indices of a common humanity, and an ultimately common fate. Nowhere do we see any sign of a ferryman who will convey these poignantly embodied souls to the farther shore. For the moment, they are glorious in their vulnerability, as they acknowledge it, and as they don't.
