Reclaiming Paint
Text by Åsa Johannesson
With their book Wet Paint, Studio Prokopiou presents a survey of the adventurous history of classical sculpture and its connections to queer bodies and sex. This book also tells the story of how aesthetics have nurtured the Western myth of whiteness and how the classical marble statue has been upheld as the ultimate symbol of Western ideals surrounding white purity. As its title suggests, paint is a key ingredient in these explorations. Greek statues were originally brightly painted with pigments made from ochre, minerals, and earth – vivid colors that, with modern eyes, would most likely be perceived as ‘garish’. In Wet Paint, this forgotten paint is reclaimed, contemporized with references to LGBTQ culture and BDSM.
Queer interest in classical sculpture has been exercised for centuries, albeit not always with the critical (and playful) lens offered by Studio Prokopiou. In his 1764 book The History of Art in Antiquity, the art historian Johann Joachim Winkelmann famously foregrounded homosexuality in his claim that classical Greek sculpture should be held as the standard for artistic realization (and so came neoclassicism). Like Winkelmann, Studio Prokopiou engages with an embodied beauty filtered through the lens of homoeroticism, but the parallel stops there. While Winkelmann laid the groundwork for what would become the canonization of Western ideals of art, Studio Prokopiou contests its supposedly ‘pure’ origins. In Wet Paint, bodies of young men are still romanticized, albeit now with a gaze that is filtered through a tongue-in-cheek dialogue with past legacies and depictions of a wider spectrum of bodies (a homage to each sitter is poignantly included in one of the chapters).
I was immediately seduced by this remarkable book, a seduction that transcends the realms of what traditional representation can account for. What Wet Paint offers is not solely re-presentations of photographic subjects but a more complex encounter, filtered through playful approaches to image-making, writing, and bookmaking. While Studio Prokopiou has drenched their photographic subjects in neon pink and black latex and cast broken limbs out of crumbly plaster, the publisher Sun Archive Books extends this play with surface and texture through meticulous production. The image plates feel brushy, oily, or otherwise textured, and the image captions are poetic rather than descriptive (‘You blinked, and a galaxy spun to life’ (plate 26)). Wet Paint also includes several longer pieces of writing. Agnieszka Wolny-Hamkalo’s text on ‘camp’ as an artistic method and Hugh Nianias’ essay on the legitimization of whitewashing stand out as poignant contributions to Studio Prokopiou’s exploration of past and present legacies. Wet Paint could be summed up as an elegant exercise in a multi-sensory form of seduction – an invitation to rethink historical narration through pleasure, as a heritage built on pretense is appropriated through a fusion of art historical critique and camp sensibility.
Åsa Johannesson’s practice concerns the relationship between queerness and photography. The past ten years she has examined new possibilities of queer vocabularies within formalist aesthetics. This work, The Queering of Photography, is produced using a large format plate camera and comprises of black and white portraits of humans and statues together with fragile installations made from Polaroid emulsions. These works are prompted by ideas of resistance and joy as a critique of dominant ideologies around what queer photography is and can be. Åsa studied at the Royal College of Art. Her doctoral thesis examined possibilities of nonbinary logic in the theorisation of the photographic image and was titled The Queering of Photography: A Generative Encounter. Åsa has exhibited her work internationally, including at Centrum för fotografi (Stockholm), Queer Britain (London), Landskrona Foto (Landskrona), Dyson Gallery (London) and FutureLab (Shanghai). With her writing, she intersects theoretical concepts from feminist and queer theory, new materialism with the logic of studio practice. Publications includes the research monograph Queer Methodology for Photography (Routledge, 2024). Her first poetry collection, And I wanted to see it: my queerness in the best light, is forthcoming. Åsa is based in London, UK and her hometown Växjö, Sweden.
Website: asajohannesson.com