“‘Paper Angel’ depicts a man crouching before a mirror, with a tower of detritus of ho-hum everyday life – books, food, half consumed, letters and cigarettes. In the painting “Paper Angel”, Dunn explores the compositional format of the lone figure in the mirror. I wanted there to be a certain grandness and heft to this moment, as when it happens in real life the emotional stakes are high.”Įarnestness is perhaps the most defining quality of Night Pictures. “He is sniffing a silk Oxford – possibly his lover’s – while a hunting hound races off-screen, presumably on the trail of whoever’s scent is on the shirt. Dunn describes the painting as being “imbued with desire, self-confidence and even self-doubt”, as his subject gets ready for an altogether different kind of hunt, on the dating scene: “I was thinking of Kate Bush’s The Hounds of Love when paintings this,” the artist reflects. To the left of the frame, modestly obscured by footwear, cocktails and cosmetics, is a pastiche of Pieter Bruegel’s “The Hunters in the Snow”. In “The Hunt”, Dunn depicts his lead preparing for a night out. “I sometimes want to be free of it all, even as I find its signifiers seductive.” “This show is about masculinity only so much as it is about my relationship to it personally, which as I’m sure is the case for many gay men, is a complicated push and pull between desire and constraint,” says Dunn. A composite of the artist, his partner and men from a well of historical and social imagery, the figure seems alone and vulnerable.
Dunn’s being is delicately cast in shafts of light.
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