Patrick Webb Intimacies

Click here to listen to Anna Fishzon interview with Patrick Webb

Anna Fishzon navigates one of the most recent groups of work by Patrick Webb: Intimacies. Placing us in the hands of Punchinello — the main character in Webb's scenes — Fishzon guides the conversation through the communion of two souls: the artist's and his alter ego's.

Punchinello cautiously becomes the thread linking the evolution of two worlds, neither absolute nor separate, between the realities of the artist and his character. Through the artist's vision, the body takes on a transformative function that is simultaneously aesthetic and political.

Webb's earlier work shows us the emotional body he inhabited at the time when the AIDS epidemic became a crisis. His art is a statement: he survived. Webb lets us see, in the smoothness of his men's curves, that aspect of contemporary civilization that has subjected bodies and sexuality to censorship. It also explores Aristophanes' myth of Androgyne, found in Plato's Symposium, and how the double spirit of men has now been left to starve to death in sorrow. Webb's art is a revolutionary breaking point with modern tradition. His men are open, soft, and able to reveal their intimacy and vulnerability in a world that often stigmatizes them. Their spirits rise in an ode to the subtleties of human nature that becomes art.

Punchinello's individual body is also a social body that, reflecting back, enlightens the collective. Webb presents this otherness through desire, filling the void with the continuity of his characters' presence (even when his characters are expressed through their objects). A true change of state transports the viewer from the turmoil of the men's identities to the symbols by which they are united within a critical society.

We witness Punchinello as he interacts with various others in various locations, always dwelling in dense, vivid events that draw their power from Webb's own life.

The forms that emerge from space to define the limits of Punchin