Markues (en)

How to Be Gay?
ongoing series of collages, each 60 x 40 cm, 2013 – 2018

How to be Gay? gathers paintings and photographs of men touching each other. They are sliced and recomposed in order to release them from their original context and open up a new, undefined pictorial space beyond the facade of central perspective. Markues infuses these moments of contact with sexuality, and invites the viewer to let their own desires guide their seeing.

Mimicking camp gestures of abstract-expressionist paintings, Markues touches, glazes and reconnects the fragments with spills of nail polish. With calligraphic marks and reflective papers, each piece revels in the pleasures of ornament and surface. The color palette is not intended to arrive with a metaphysical overload of meaning, but rather with the light erotics suggested by the names of the nail polish itself: Sweet as Candy, Hey, Nude!, Open Your Heart, Charming, Flirt With Me, Can’t Get Enough, Let’s Get Lost.