Each man kills the thing he loves...

Philip Steele EACH MAN KILLS THE THING HE LOVES...

Mark Coetzee, Owen Martin, Tanya Poole

780620

939676

Mark Coetzee Owen Martin Tanya Poole 9

New Works by Philip Steele

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Front cover: Philip Steele, Scott O’Hara, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

Back cover: Philip Steele, Joe Simmons (detail), 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

First published in 2021 by Postmeridian Independent Art Publishing postmeridianpublishing@gmail.com @postmeridianp

Artist: Philip Steele Authors: Mark Coetzee, Owen Martin, and Tanya Poole Editor: Mark Coetzee Book Design: Philip Steele Printing: Scan Shop Binding: N.C. Novel Binding cc Scans: Dog Ear Editions

© Philip Steele, and Postmeridian Independent Art Publishing

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the artist.

ISBN: 978-0-620-93967-6

A copy of this book has been lodged with the National Library of South Africa

The type for this book was set in Brandon Grotesque Light

This book was printed on Neo Star Matt (170 gsm) with white Cartridge endsheets (120 gsm) sewn and case bound in 2 mm board covered with Matt Art (130 gsm) with a matte film lamination

Printed and bound in Cape Town, South Africa

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New Works by

Philip Steele

Mark Coetzee Owen Martin Tanya Poole

21 October - 20 November 2021

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Colophon...........................................................................................................................................2 Artist Statement - Philip Steele.................................................................................................6 - 7 Introduction - Luan Nel..............................................................................................................8 - 9 The Efforts of Sympathy - Interview by Mark Coetzee with Philip Steele .........................10 - 17 Against Forgetting - Owen Martin........................................................................................18 - 25 Liquid Caress - Tanya Poole...................................................................................................26 - 33 Plates......................................................................................................................................35 - 123 Biographies...........................................................................................................................124 - 127 Thanks.............................................................................................................................................128

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This body of work establishes a contemporary memento mori, a tradition that imbues an object with reminders of the inevitability of death. It ensures that these individuals, and their images that have brought us so much pleasure, are not forgotten but commemorated, celebrated, and monumentalised. I have always been fascinated with portraiture and how it does not simply represent the face of an individual. In the hands of the Artist it declares many layers of those represented, from the public to the personal, from the shown to the hidden, and the complex components that define our identity.

Considering how many people have lost their loved ones during the Covid-19 pandemic, I contemplated how communities represent their loss through: memorials, ceremonies, rituals, and statistics. Lockdown has given us all time to read, think, and, consider. I used this time to investigate my gay erotic publication archive. While studying this archive, I thought about who these individuals were. I then established a systematic methodology to investigate: Who were they? Where did they come from? How did they die?

At what age did they die? Are they remembered or commemorated in any way? Who did they love? Were they loved in return?

In my research, I found that the majority of these erotic actors died tragic deaths in their youth that were often uncanny or violent. Their average life expectancy was only thirty-three years. I found it shocking how many of them died at the hands of others, even by their biggest fans. Many died from AIDS, and others by suicide.

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I found as much information as possible on these performers. I delved deep into their personal lives, searching for information through obituaries, social media accounts (if they were still available online), police reports, missing person archives, forensic documentation, and even going so far as to use Google Street View to find out where their bodies were found. I walked the road were they were murdered. I crossed the traffic intersection where they crashed. In buildings I found the floors from which they jumped.

I took on the role of a private investigator, or an obsessed fan. I asked myself: How does their work live on? What is their legacy? I began to empathise with these individuals. For some people these actors meant so much, and their deaths were met with great sadness. Others believed these actors were deserving of a premature death because of the way they lived their lives.

This body of work has taught me just how lethal prejudice can be. My work uses painting to memorialise and beatify (the second stage in canonizing saints) male erotic film actors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries who were gay or did gay erotic scenes. These martyrs, for me and many other gay men before me, represent beauty, positive affirmation of gay desire, and the celebration of that desire. How it could be played out and acted upon unashamedly.

I truly hope that my gesture offers them the tribute they deserve.

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Nel Gallery opened in November 2019 as an artist run, and owned, space.

I started the gallery as I believed that the experience and insight that I had gained over time could be put to the benefit of a greater group of artists. The gallery could highlight specific issues that I believed were being sidelined, and instead be a new gallery directed with an inclusive program. A program that would welcome and address, amongst others, issues that speak to LGBTQI+ artists, and hopefully the community as well. Our second group exhibition, “The Hang Turns Queer”, set the pace with work by artists who challenged the standard expressions of sexuality, gender, and preconceived stereotypes relating to their identity. Artists were sourced, both locally and internationally. The exhibition was well received.

This led to Nel Gallery’s involvement with various other LGBTQI+ organisations and platforms, including Pride Afrique, the very first PanAfrican Pride event that took place online during the Covid-19 pandemic in June 2020. It was a great honour to create a visual arts component for this groundbreaking first for Africa.

Nel continued working with queer artists, creating videos for United Prides of Africa’s online Pride event later the same year. This group linked multiple Pride-like organisations from across Africa, including Madagascar.

This year, Nel Gallery continues its involvement by contributing to the wider curation of Pride Afrique 2021. This year’s theme focuses on trauma and the slow violence committed against LGBTQI+ individuals and communities throughout Africa. South Africa, here, is key as a role model. This year we brought in the director of the Pride Shelter Trust, Nicole Alexander, to highlight the trust’s work and homeless LGBTQI+ people that they deal with daily. The Pride Shelter is the only one of its kind in Africa. It is keen to have its concerns voiced but, sadly, is desperate for funding. Their idea is to create more shelters across the continent. Currently people fleeing severe discrimination and trauma from various other provinces and countries, flock to this single shelter—which can only house a limited number of people.

Nel Gallery’s programme of exhibitions and performances reflects our aim of being inclusive of various voices and multiple issues, paying attention to the intertextual nature any such exploration often has. No one case is ever the same as another. Our approach aspires to be broad enough to 9

accommodate many issues and views. We were never given a handbook and are learning each day, cutting a path forward, by the group exhibitions we show, by the solos we host—expanding the discourse one show at a time.

Philip Steele’s exhibition “Each man kills the thing he loves…” presents us with a pantheon of anti-heroes. Depicted in the finest hand-applied washes of ink. The artist calls this their beatification (the second stage in canonizing saints). On closer inspection one gathers more information.

These are portraits of erotic films stars who have passed away. The artist makes us aware of the tragedy, and untimeliness of their deaths, in the red text painted on each painting. Their passing is tied to their living life on the edge of society. Existing in that shadow space that occupies gay men’s imagination and fantasies.

“Live fast and die young” as the saying goes.

This is evidently true when the average age of death in this group is only thirty-three.

The sensitive treatment of each individual portrait suggests a tenderness—a treatment of the subject that is unexpected. Instead of using images that might display these men as their best erotic selves, the artist treats each portrait with individual care, as if he knew them, and with the dignity usually reserved for more mainstream celebrity. They are a restorative commemoration to lives spent in service, in supplying and supporting gay men’s fantasies, desires and pleasures. I would advise reading the text painted on each artwork to fully grasp and experience the texture of this unique body of work. The information was not always easily sourced. The artist researched intensely, scouring accident reports, police filings, obituaries and more, to flesh out cold, thin, initial fact sheets. They are melancholic portraits of young men who died too soon because of their choice of occupation, being gay, and not fitting the standard by which society creates rank and superiority. They were cast aside and soon after they died.

Nel Gallery is proud to host this unique and timely exhibition.

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Mark Coetzee: I have got to know you and your work so well, since early 2017, both on a personal and professional level. In this interview, I thought it might be nice not to follow a chronological sequence but rather investigate common themes and concerns that we have had ongoing conversations about. Tonight we sit together, yet again, in the dark, waiting for an Eskom power outage to end. Thankfully I charged my laptop before the power outage started. Ideas keep us sane.

Philip Steele: I really enjoy our organic conversations and especially how they go off on tangents as we investigate the complex relationships of images, ideas, art, and the references from where they come. Through our conversations I have come to understand that “a pipe is never really a pipe” but rather images are infused with an incomprehensible amount of references, appropriations, edits, and interpretations.

Mark Coetzee: Looking at this new body of work, it seems to me that some of the works are painted directly from newspaper or magazine clippings.

Other works feel almost as if they are an amalgamation of various images of the same erotic actor. Could you elaborate on this process and why emulation, appropriation, and specific modes of reference are so important in your work?

Philip Steele: When I do my research I try to find as many images of the subject as possible, portraits, mugshots, obituaries, and social media—if available.

I collect various images, including what films they starred in, and then consolidate these images into a single representation. I do this to develop a full understanding of how I can capture their gestures and the characteristics of their visage.

It can be quite a strange feeling watching an erotic film star that you know has died, especially one who has died in a tragic way.

Even if I find one image that I am attracted to, or work directly from, this project has taught me, it is not so much about the image of the person that counts in capturing them, but rather their attitude, their gesture, and how they show their emotions. Sometimes behind a sexy smirk I see innocence, 11

humility, and sadness. Another thing this body of work has taught me is how certain faces really capture the Zeitgeist of a particular era or time.

I remember you telling me about reading a cameraman’s notes. He spoke about how, in his opinion, neither Elizabeth Taylor nor James Dean were great actors but when they got behind the camera something special happened “almost as if they made love to the camera.” It seems that some individuals’s image operates differently on film than other people.

I also remember you telling me about another example of this. A photographer that captured Georgia O’Keeffe in her desert home in Sante Fe, New Mexico. It is debated whether the photographer actually composed the images of O’Keeffe. Your argument is that O’Keeffe was the real photographer here as she took control of how she was captured, composed, and exposed. She constructed her iconic status, just like many contemporary celebrities do today.

Mark Coetzee: How do we indicate value of life? We have often spoken about what I call the “Romeo and Juliet Syndrome,” a specific literary mechanism played out in so much fictional writing. I challenge the different values of life in literature. Entire army’s die for the pride or vanity of the king, independent states go to war to preserve the pride of a husband married to a beautiful women, and in this case individuals die to allow the consumption of desire by a few. This literary mechanism potentially originates from the Great Chain of Being prevalent in the work of William Shakespeare. Is this not, however, simply an unjust hierarchical system? Why is the life of a serf, soldier, worker (or in this case sex worker) less valid or valued in traditions of Western story telling?

So many literary heroes die tragic deaths at a young age. Is your work in protest or simply an acknowledgement of these horrific outcomes?

Are you more interested in the aesthetic possibilities that the faces of these erotic actors provide or are you also a social or sexual activist? Or is it a completely different process which deals with guilt, culpability, taboo, or simply the embarrassment of acknowledging one’s own desires and how we indulge and satisfy these desires?

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Are you asking the viewer to set aside puritanical expectations and not only celebrate these erotic stars but also to acknowledge and celebrate our own right to enjoy their beauty, the fantasies that they create for our titillation, the satisfaction of our fantasies, and desires in a safe space? Is your work going beyond a moral or ethical accusation? Judgement of others seems the easiest way to hide our own desires and how we satisfy them. Are these works not actually about the narratives of the individuals and rather about giving them a voice? Are you not also challenging the “hypocrisy of desire?”

Much male on female erotic film is heavily criticised by feminists. Are you proposing the way that male on male erotic film functions in a different way?

You use words such as beauty, liberation, empowerment, etc., to describe male on male erotic film—which is the absolute antithesis of how male on female erotic film is described.

Philip Steele: These portraits both challenge, critique, give a public voice to, refuse to forget and instead elevate the individuals that I represent.

The function of male on female erotic film is to find a position of power for both the male actor and the male viewer. This genre of erotic film is made by men, according to the values of men, for the consumption of men. In my opinion, as you suggest, male on male erotic film functions completely differently and produces completely different outcomes. These erotic films have changed how the gay community sees itself. They function as a tool of empowerment, an endorsement of desires that were, and often still are, considered taboo. This male on male imagery has provided a safe space for me, and many other young gay men, not only to have our desires mirrored back at us, but also the first, or only, representation of our sexual identities. I believe that we owe a great debt to these individuals who made this happen, and who were basically martyred or excommunicated because of the gift they provided to so many of us.

Mark Coetzee: So you state that male on male erotic film is empowering, it has a different system and functionality. In the past your work emphasised the visual mechanisms of power, gender, and orientation representation.

This new body of work emphasises the specificities of your work, your personal lived experience and what gender, desire, and having a public voice mean to you.

Philip Steele: Recently I was thinking of how Michaelangelo utilised Mimesis—combining different idealised parts of different models—to create the David sculpture. Inevitably Michaelangelo’s models die, but the David survives. For me, the images and the videos are all we have left of our “Davids”. These erotic male actors were the artist, the model, and most importantly the artwork. Yes, one can argue that there was multiple layers of agency—lighting technicians, camera crew, etc. Let us not forget though that Michaelangelo too had agency—there were tool makers, his muses, his studio, and his assistants.

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I think there is something strange in seeing a “David” that has died or fallen.

We might not contemplate his importance, his contribution to such a broad scope of humanity. Someone who dared to shape, for better or for worse, a community. Like many tragic heroes in Western literature, here is the double edged sword. You can be beatified for challenging or even changing moral codes, but you are also judged and die by those same moral systems you refused to allow to dictate your emotions and intelligence. “Each man kills the thing he loves, yet each man does not die…”

Although I see my work as an extension of a long trajectory of the representation of homoerotic desire, it also functions very differently to early art history. No matter how ground breaking or influential the David was, or is, it still functions by making an “excuse.” An “excuse” to create homoerotic imagery through the representation of the heroic male nude.

Still though, a representation that required the sublimation of homoerotic desire. My work is more direct, confrontational. I refuse to accept that I must provide excuses regarding my identity or sublimate how or why I, or my community, demand to be represented.

Mark Coetzee: We have been through three components of art: Logos (logic), Ethos (ethics), and Pathos (emotion). It seems to me that, with the emphasis of tertiary art education institutions on conceptual practice, no space is made for sentimentality in art. Sentiment seems to be considered a second class concern. How can a three legged vessel stand and even remain relevant when you remove one of it’s feet? Let’s talk about what role pathos plays in all of this. I am not taking about something being pathetic, asking for our sentimental response, but rather the grand tradition of Pathétique (the evocation of emotions).

Philip Steele: That is a good a point because we tend to deny the difficult emotions in art which mirror life. We deny feeling (Pathos) in art.

Stars on OnlyFans are celebrated while traditional sex workers are victimised and murdered. Things have opened up. The efforts of past workers opened the door for contemporary practitioners. Social stigmas have changed to such an extent that the general public are now comfortable with broadcasting erotic videos, and still images, of themselves participating in activities that, in the past, one would be hard pressed to get people to admit to. Some early erotic stars changed the victimhood narrative. They now comfortably move between high fashion modelling, mainstream acting, and erotic films.

Mark Coetzee: In this project you have used the highest level of archival materials to offer longevity and to ensure that the works are eligible for public collections. We normally associate the materials of bronze and marble with public monument. Can you elaborate on your archival concerns and why this is so pivotal for the meaning of this project?

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Philip Steele:I use the same mechanisms, that society uses, to never forget loved ones, to remember these individuals that might otherwise be forgotten.

Each portrait is displayed side by side, top to bottom, in a very tight grid formation. This echos the personal ways that we commemorate loved ones, through gravestones, obituaries, and memorial services; and publicly through monuments, parks, street naming, and requiems.

Each painting is on Arches Watercolour, hot pressed, 300 g/m2, 100% cotton paper. This is the best paper I could find. I used the best possible materials to commemorate those that might be forgotten. I used materials worthy of their commemoration. Materials that will stand the test of time.

We have always used timeless materials such as stone, bronze, etc., to monumentalise. Conceptually, I see myself doing the same thing with the material choices I am making.

Mark Coetzee: What made you use black ink on paper for the majority of works in this series?

Philip Steele: Working with ink introduces a complex visual language into my practice. For this project, I thought a lot about the medium of ink itself, how it was used by artists in the past, and how it is now used by contemporary artists. I thought about how mass media is dependent on ink and printing. In my work the medium of ink informs content. That content, in turn, informs how the ink behaves, which in the end defines how I manipulate the medium.

I like the immediacy of the medium of ink as well as the commitment to the mark. Unlike painting where one can remove layers, or overpaint, when using ink once a mark is made, it is absolutely permanent. It is a decision that cannot be reversed. The medium of ink allows me to capture what I am feeling (sadness, empathy, lust, or desire). I paint fast, I need this speed of medium to capture the essence of my emotional and intellectual response.

Indian Ink is made from carbon black, a material that was used as far back as Ancient Egypt. In my act of memorialising these actors I use Indian Ink for its archival qualities, I really want the images of the individuals I paint to stand the test of time. I want their images to be remembered. I want to solidify and recognise their importance in the LGBTQI+ community and the world.

Mark Coetzee: How did this all start?

Philip Steele: This project began when I started looking at, and studying the representation of Saints. How they were martyred in the most horrific ways for their convictions. I am fascinated with how different institutions represent/ed these Saints. We see one Saint being tortured to death, but his face shows no pain, his visage is calm. Most of them, take Saint Sebastian for instance, actually look like they are in ecstasy. I kept thinking, what price 15

does one pay to stand up for your beliefs? Is death a reasonable price?

Throughout lockdown and quarantine I kept hearing about how so many people have died from Covid-19. Many of our close family and friends are no longer with us. Statistics, pictures, and numbers of people that are infected, or have died became part of my daily life, like a memento mori, constantly reminding me of my own inevitable death.

I researched how communities commemorated their loved ones that have died. Not only from Covid-19 but also soldiers that perished in battle, victims of terrorist attacks, etc.

I spent time going through an archive I have collected of homoerotic magazines (some old dating back to the 1950s, and others from this century). I started thinking about who these actors were? Why did they participate in these publications? What were their stories? How did they survive in a society that ostracised them (and us) for being gay and acting upon their (our) desires?

I found it fascinating how people respond to portraiture. It seems to me that the face is read as a book, a look, a “window into the soul”, a desire, and the representation of an identity.

When I paint these portraits I think about, who were their lovers? Did they have friends? What were their personalities like? Who did they remind me of? Some of them really surprised me with their life stories. Some were involved in government scandals, one even had a toy action figure made of him in Japan. It is exciting for me never knowing what I will find.

Sometimes I would find an actor with a story that broke my heart. I think Kyle McKenna’s story has to be one of the most heart-wrenching I came across. His own family rejected him throughout his life. After his death they refused to identify or collect his body. Kyle’s ex-lover had to make arrangements to have his remains cremated. Stories such as these made me want to honour these actors and commemorate them.

The work/performance/art they made really mean a lot to many gay men, like myself. These actors helped us to see beyond the negative, those of us who had been manipulated into thinking that nothing positive can result from being gay.

Everything changed when I saw them.

Mark Coetzee: We are always told that the role of art is to help us see things in a new way. In the 20th century we saw an obsession with “isms” where artists were under constant pressure to create a new manifesto. A new way of working, and a rejection of what came before. This results in enormous pressure on artists to work in a certain way and basically to conform to 16

a new status quo. In the end there was no new way of seeing, there was just a new way of prescription. In this new body of work one can talk about “perversion”. What many people would see as the “perversion” of lifestyle, the “perversion” of choices, orientation, work, or career. The “perversion” of a morally justified death. The “perversion” of you as an artist becoming an obsessed fan, obsessive regarding these peoples lives.

I would like us to delve deeper into this concept of “perversion”. If art production in the 20th century has demonstrated that constantly trying to establish something new simply establishes prescriptive practice, then how does an artist approach change in the way we see anything? I do not believe that the “perversion” of these works lies in in some “ism”. Not in some statement that proposes new technical or pictoral ways of representation.

Nor does the “perversion” of this body of work lie in the fact that you are commemorating them, or maybe it does?

Thinking back again about the “Romeo and Juliet Syndrome”, is that where your “perversion” lies? “Civilised society’s” greatest fear is that “perversion” leads to decadence, decadence leads to indulgence, and indulgence leads to individualism. In our pursuit of individualism, societal structures are no longer paramount (and as a result the rules, regulations, and norms, that are constructed to protect societal structures, fall away). So to be precise in, society’s eyes, “perversion” leads to chaos.

So to come back to my question, does your “perversion” lie not in the representation of the individuals that chose to live their life this way, but rather that you choose to memorialise, commemorate, monumentalise, and beatify, individuals that society tells us are not worth being memorialised, commemorated, monumentalised, and beatified? We all know that in art history, certain people were deemed “worthy” of portraiture such as the Medicis, the Pope, successful Dutch traders of the Golden Age, or early American Industrialists such as the Vanderbilts or the Astors, and colonialists such as Cecil John Rhodes.

Is your “perversion” the fact that you propose these individuals you paint also completely worthy of representation?

How dare you represent people that society has rejected? How dare you commemorate someone who’s existence we want to deny? How dare you make us confront our deepest desires? How dare you expose what these individuals mean to us behind closed doors while we gaze at a magazine or computer screen?

Philip Steele: My “perversion” is making you confront your own “perversion”.

If you did not carry the guilt of admitting that perhaps, your most intimate relationships are with these individuals, there would be no “perversion” in the first place. We are horrified to hear stories of families that discard their children, because of their children’s orientation or lifestyle choices. We 17

convince ourselves that we as individuals would be incapable of behaving in such a way, our liberalism would save us from rejecting that person for such “normal” choices. Yet, every time we deny our intimate relationships with these erotic actors, we are throwing our own sons on to the street, we are discarding their memories, we are banning the sound of their name in our home and in our society. We are demonising our own children. We are demonising the choices of our children. So through the mere act of who I chose to represent, I believe my work becomes a grand political gesture challenging not art for art sake, not some “ism”, not some visual cannon. It challenges the morals, the responsibilities, the fears, and what you refer to as the “Romeo and Juliet Syndrome” itself.

There are established traditions surrounding the representation of death.

This body of work extends that conversation. It also goes beyond a discourse regarding morbidity, representation of loss, and memento mori. It’s representation of a life lost, both challenges and “perverts” life itself. A life presently being lived, and our attitude to how we will love ourselves in the time we still have here. As you have articulated yourself in your own artistic practice and your exhibition “All Our Sons.”

These are all our sons. If we allow society to convince us that the love and admiration of any one of these young men is not worthwhile, we reject our own brothers, our cousins, our fathers, our uncles—all our sons.

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On encountering Philip Steele’s series “Each man kills the thing he loves…”, I was immediately struck by a sense of tragedy.

Formed of more than one hundred ink on paper, and acrylic on canvas portraits, each image depicts a man who is deceased.

Inscribed onto the surface of the image is the subject’s name alongside the date of their death and their age at the time of their death. Next to each portrait is a short text describing the circumstances of their passing, often under grisly circumstances.

With few exceptions, none of these subjects made it past their early thirties.

Take the image of “Leo Cooper” for instance. According to the inscription, “Born in Prague1 Cooper committed suicide by jumping off a building. He documented his last moments on Facebook.” He was thirty years old. When I ask Steele about Cooper, he explains that he was an actor who starred in gay erotic films, and that “Leo Cooper” was one of the pseudonyms that he used.

Other portraits also make subjects of male actors who starred in gay erotic films, based on photographs that the artist found online. For some the cause of death is unknown—a violent erasure of its own kind. While researching the project, Steele came to realise that many of the men, idolized by the gay community while they were alive, vanished from popular imagination once they were gone.

1 After the fall of the Communist Regime in Czechoslovakia (1989), Prague became one of the global capital cities for the production of gay erotic films. People gained greater sexual freedom but financial desperation meant the exploitation of many young men in bareback videos. The emphasis on youth and beauty in gay erotic images and film also resulted in many young men being discarded when they were deemed too old.

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The title of the series is taken from Oscar Wilde’s2 1898 poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.3 Steele uses the poem’s most memorable line to reflect upon sexual attraction’s paradoxical ability to elicit impulses of affection as well as destruction. In the poem, Wilde narrates the incarceration and execution of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife—something Wooldridge immediately and deeply regretted. Wilde had observed Wooldridge while he was also incarcerated in the prison of Reading Gaol, on charges of sodomy and gross indecency.

While The Ballad of Reading Gaol focuses on the character of Wooldridge, it is possible to understand it as a metaphor for the affections and subsequent antipathy of the British public towards the poet himself. Much celebrated in the 1880s and 1890s for his plays and writing, Wilde was sentenced to two years of forced labour in 1895 for his homosexuality. He passed away three years after his release, impoverished and a spectre of his previous self. This is where Steele picks up on Wilde’s poem, perhaps recognising in it a further metaphor for the actors he has chosen to depict. Idolized by the gay community for their physical attractiveness and sexual prowess, they are, like Wilde, subsequently destroyed by their success—either at their own hands or at the hands of others.

Steele is not the first artist to repurpose and reimagine The 2 Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. He was a notorious aesthete, famous for his decadent lifestyle and dandyism. In 1895 Wilde was found guilty of being a homosexual and was sentenced to prison. He was imprisoned for two years and died three years after due to poor health from his incarceration. The tomb of Oscar Wilde is located in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France.

3 Gaol is a historical term meaning jail or prison.

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Ballad of Reading Gaol. In 1982 the German filmmaker, actor and playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder4 directed Querelle, based on the novel Querelle de Brest by Jean Genet5 (himself a queer icon). In Fassbinder’s film, Jeanne Moreau’s6 character, Lysiane, serenades Querelle—a pansexual, murderous and drug trafficking sailor—with Wilde’s poem. Her refrain, “Each man kills the thing he loves” expresses a central tenet of the film and presages the downfall of a number of characters within it. This includes her own husband Nono, who has sex with Querelle.

Querelle goes on to seduce and murder Vic, his drug trafficking accomplice, and allows himself to be seduced by Gil, who he then frames for the crimes that Querelle himself committed.

Fassbinder’s film, as well as Genet’s novel, clearly transgressed established codes of Western morality in 1980s and 1950s European culture. Steele arguably builds on this tradition. Just as the character Querelle instrumentalises sex to achieve specific outcomes, the subjects in Steele’s series instrumentalise sex for financial need, benefit, or power.

For example, the inscription on the portrait of Calvin Williams, describes how the erotic actor and sex worker testified in court against his clients in the 1989 - 1990 “Washington Call Boy Scandal”.7 This brought about his clients’ downfall but gained him immunity from prosecution. It strikes me that Steele asks us to 4 Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945 - 1982) was a German filmmaker and is widely regarded as the catalyst of the New German Cinema movement. Many of his films focused on gay and lesbian themes. His prolific career lasted less than two decades, but he still completed over forty films before dying from a lethal cocktail of cocaine and barbiturates.

5 Jean Genet (1910 - 1986) was a French criminal and social outcast turned novelist, poet, and political activist. Genet transformed subject matter that was considered absent into poetic writing. He became one of the leading figures in avant-garde theatre, specially Theatre of the Absurd. Genet’s literature is praised and highly respected. His work explores complicated thematics regarding same-sex desire, lust, drug abuse, loneliness, grief, and death.

6 Jeanne Moreau (1928 - 2017) was an iconic award winning French actress.

Moreau’s career captured the hearts of the gay community for her upfront sexual allure and expression of desire in her films. She is solidified in queer history for her androgynous role in the film Jules et Jim (1962) where her character Catherine wore a moustache to pass as a male in public.

7 The “Washington Call Boy Scandal” was an investigation conducted by The Washington Times into Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence. Spence was a customer of male escorts and male sex workers. He gave them clandestine tours of the White House at the time of the Reagan administration.

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remember and empathise with subjects like Calvin, appreciating them for their complexities and contradictions, and resisting a tendency to posthumously sanitise them.

The American artist David Wojnarowicz8 also reflected on loss and violence. Working in the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, Wojnarowicz’s practice is imbued with rage at a society who treated LGBTQI+ subjects with distain and disgust. In his activism and his artistic practice, he challenged the negligence displayed by the administration of Ronald Reagan9 towards Americans affected by AIDS, the vast majority who were members of the LGBTQI+ community and Americans of colour. Yet Wojnarowicz’s practice also carries with it a resilience to the conditions that he lived through and solicits the viewer to empathise with him and a wider community.

Perhaps his most well-known work, Untitled (One Day This Kid…)10 from 1992, the same year that Wojnarowicz passed away from AIDS related complications, makes this manifest. It is formed of a text surrounding a black and white image of a boy, based on a photograph of the artist, who is on the verge

8 David Wojnarowicz (1954 - 1992) was an American painter and AIDS Activist in New York City during the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Wojnarowicz’s work deals with activism, AIDS, politics, and sexual orientation. Wojnarowicz died of AIDS at the age of thirty-seven.

9 Ronald Reagan (1911 - 2004) was the fortieth President of the United States of America. He is acknowledged as being the voice of modern conservatism in America. President Reagan and his administration remained silent during the AIDS epidemic for almost four years. Only after more the 3,500 people had died and thousands more infected did they eventually acknowledge the disease publicly.

AIDS was known as the “gay plague” due to the fact that the gay community was hit worst by the disease in the USA. In 1982, Larry Speakes, press secretary for Reagan, laughed when asked about whether the president was tracking the spread of AIDS in America.

10 David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (One Day This Kid…), 1990, Photostat, Paper size: 83.7 × 101.4 cm (32 15/16 × 39 15/16 in.), image size: 70.9 × 94.4 cm (27 15/16 × 39 15/16 in.), Edition of 10. This work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. USA. 22

of puberty. The text11 narrates the psychological, physical and political violence that the boy will experience, “in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy,” a violence so great that it, “will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in the hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility.”

The text clearly solicits the viewer to recognise the destructiveness of homophobia and could describe many of the subjects that Steele has depicted in his own series.

The reference that first came to mind when I encountered “Each man kills the thing he loves…” and that Steele brought up in my studio visit,12 is Marlene Dumas’s13 remarkable “Great Men” series. In her ink on paper portraits, Dumas depicts sixteen male 11 This text illuminates the parallels of consciousness that both David Wojnarowicz and Oscar Wilde shared in their work.

“One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separation of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn’t mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.”

12 Studio visit and interview by Owen Martin with Philip Steele, Westside Studios, Cape Town, South Africa, 27 June 2021.

13 Marlene Dumas (1953 - ) is a South African artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She paints primarily in oil, and ink. Dumas’s figurative work deals with difficult themes and confronts violence, displacement, racism, and investigates erotism in complex ways. Dumas’s practice uses found imagery that speaks to her personal life, as well as broader socio-political currents in contemporary society.

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artists, filmmakers and intellectuals who have been influential— subjects as varied as Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin14 and Pier Paolo Pasolini15—and who were, in some form, persecuted for their homosexuality or perceived identity. Each subject has their name, date of birth, date of death and a short biographical text about them inscribed onto the portrait’s surface. The format was clearly influential for Steele but I believe that the more significant learning for the artist, is how a memorial, even as it looks to the past, can be a transgressive force in the present.

“Great Men” was commissioned for Manifesta 10,16 the itinerant European art biennial, which took place in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2014, with the work being displayed in The State Hermitage Museum.17 The year prior to the biennial, Russia had passed a draconian law18 persecuting LGBTQI+ communities under the

14 James Baldwin (1924 - 1987) was an American novelist, playwright, poet, and activist. His writings explore and interweave themes of masculinity, sexuality, race, and class. In his writings Baldwin’s protagonists are mostly gay African American men. His texts played an integral part in both the civil rights, and gay liberation, movements.

15 Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was an Italian filmmaker, director, writer, and intellectual. Despite Pasolini’s accredited importance in European cinematic arts, his legacy and films still remain contentious, due to his controversial personality and style of filming that dealt with sexual taboos. His horrific death still remains a mystery to this day.

16 In 1993, Manifesta established itself as a major European art biennial.

It focuses on contemporary art and is held every two years in a different area in Europe. It is informed by the resulting socio-political and economic changes that followed the Cold War, and the resulting efforts for the reunification of Europe.

It takes as a specific intention the creation of a dialogue between art and society in Europe, and explores the geographical and physiological territory of Europe. It purposefully distances itself from what is considered the dominant art centres.

17 Founded in 1764 by Empress Catherine the Great, The State Hermitage Museum located in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the largest art museum in the world.

It houses some of the world’s most priceless artefacts and paintings.

18 Although same-gender sexual activity between consenting adults in Russia was decriminalised in 1993. LGBTQI+ individuals in Russia still experience discrimination today. Russia is considered one of the most unsafe places to visit for LGBTQI+ people. Russian federal law passed the “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values” in 2013. This law is also known as the “Anti-gay Law” or “Gay Propaganda Law” which prohibits the education, or “promotion” of homosexuality—stating it is not the norm in Russian society. The Russian government has proclaimed that this law was introduced to protect children from being exposed to homosexuality.

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pretext of protecting children and families (Mark Gevisser’s19 book The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers, does a great job at teasing out the impact of this law).

Despite Dumas stating that she is not an activist, exhibiting “Great Men” in Russia’s most prestigious museum a year after the law’s passing, was a provocative act. It memorialised subjects who many others, particularly those in positions of power, would prefer are excised from both the past and the present.

And finally, “Each man kills the thing he loves…” evolves Steele’s own practice by eliciting the emotional involvement of the viewer in a way that breaks new ground for the artist.

Prior to this series, Steele reworked imagery from vintage and hardcore gay erotic magazines to create large scale, figurative paintings indebted to 1980s American painters such as David Salle.20 Likewise, Steele’s moving image practice reworked gay erotic videos, such as in Foucauldian Men (2018), adding subtitles extracted from an interview conducted with French philosopher Michel Foucaul,21 subtitles that do not correlate to what we hear the actors actually saying.

While these works sought to transgress the boundaries of what our society often defines as permissible, both in content and in

19 Mark Gevisser’s book The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers published on 28 July 2020, explores the volatile conversations around gender identity and sexuality that have polarising debates around the world. His book brings readers to the forefront of these debates, laws, and ethics, highlighting the cause for such division.

20 An American artist from the Pictures Generation, David Salle (1952 - ) is a painter and writer. Salle’s pastiche paintings and prints depict what appear to be random juxtaposed collage images layered with drawings, paint, and text.

21 The French philosopher, writer, and activist, Michel Foucault (1923 1984) is recognised as one of the most influential philosophers and academics of the twentieth century. His work and theories primarily address the relationships and dynamics between power and knowledge. The 1981 April edition of Gai Pied magazine published an interview with Michel Foucault and Jean Le Bitoux with the translated titled, “Friendship as a way of life”. This is the interview that Steele refers to in his video work Foucauldian Men (2018).

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their questioning of originality, in the vein of Richard Prince,22 Steele’s new body of work appeals to the viewer for stronger emotional engagement.

“Each man kills the thing he loves…” asks us to not only identify with the subject depicted but insists that they are worth remembering. This is perhaps the most transgressive act Steele has undertaken thus far and I look forward to seeing Steele take this forward.

22 Richard Prince (1949 - ) is an American painter and photographer.

Prince’s work has garnered controversy over many years due to his appropriation technique which has illicited multiple lawsuits over copyright infringement. His process involves copying and sampling other people’s work to make his own art work.

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I have been looking through the recent artworks of Philip Steele, a collection of portraits which make up the exhibition “Each man kills the thing he loves…”, all of which are painted in ink and most of which are painted on paper. Seen collectively, the portraits have a sameness, a flat effect; thin, like black and white film, pictures in a yearbook.1 Red texts punctuate the images, handwritten as if taken from a journal or as marginalia.2 Up close, each painting discloses its aura. Even closer, I can see the subtleties of the ink describing the subjects’ faces and expressions, and also Steele’s ability to evoke both intensity and nuance.

Steele told me that these are portraits of men who have been involved in the erotic film industry and whom he has selected from his gay erotic archive3 because of his curiosity about their existence beyond this professional aspect. What he found was a dismaying lack of information about their personal lives and a shocking tendency towards dying young and often under violent circumstances—suicide included.

1 A yearbook, is a publication of graduate students from high school or university with small passport size head and shoulder shots of the graduating class.

Underneath the photograph of each graduate is a short biography and provision is made for the student to leave a personal phrase. The images in yearbooks are often laid out in a grid pattern. Historically, due to the cost of printing, these images were usually printed in black and white.

2 Marginalia are small notes, markings, scribbles, and even doodles or illustrations depicted on the margin of a text in a written document such as a book, note, or contract, etc.

3 Archives normally preserve what is considered to be valuable documents of a particular society or culture. In this context, the mere fact that Steele has built an archive of this nature questions and rebalances that which is “worthy” of being recorded, preserved, and valued. Steele’s awareness of the political ramifications of public endorsed archives and the need for building personal archives can be ascribed to the fact that during Steele’s studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, the Centre for Curating the Archive was an integral part of the school’s activities and identity.

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I reflect on why Steele has chosen to start describing, and continue describing, these portraits in this medium. He told me about his almost stalkerish obsession with finding out more about these men and their untimely deaths: looking at head shots, pausing moments from their films, and finding their places of death on Google Maps’ street view. Steele has not met these men, he has not seen them in the flesh and they are strangers to him, yet his portraits of them are utterly moving in their tender intimacy.

These works were conceptualised, researched and made under Covid-19 restrictions when Steele and his partner quarantined for over a year and where the world came to experience a deprivation of physical affection and touch and where gazes turned inward.

This body of work is further contextualised by art history, and in particular, the history of ink painting and drawing. With this in mind I looked at Steele’s portraits with his eye of awareness and how this history informs and frames this body of work.

Looking quite far back in history, I think of the kinds of examples of inks that may have informed Steele’s process: hand prints on cave walls, paintings of the afterlife in Egyptian funerary paintings, Minoan paintings, delicate erotic sketches on the walls of Pompeii, Japanese Shunga, preparatory sketches for larger compositions of grand European Renaissance tableaux,4 small private erotic inks that were covert, kept in bedroom drawers 4 European Renaissance artists used a drawing technique called cartoon transfer which allowed them to plan, compose, and sketch preliminary works for their final artworks which were often executed in oil paint or fresco. This cartoon transfer technique was used by Raphael in his fresco The School of Athens, located in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican.

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and private collections,5 and Last Portraits from 17th Century Holland.

In the range of examples listed above, the images and inks function in different ways. Hand prints on cave walls, made with ground ochres and spit, or animal fat, were a way to make a mark of presence, which outlived their owner and which connected them to later generations, who would in turn leave their own prints. Ink paintings on the walls of tombs in ancient Egypt were painted to ensure that the inhabitant of the tomb had a good and comfortable afterlife. Minoan paintings celebrated the pleasures of being alive. Erotic paintings discovered in Pompeii on the walls of brothels were there to arouse as well as to depict the activities on offer. Japanese Shunga described sexual activities and were sometimes gifted to newlyweds, and sometimes used as good luck charms. Last Portraits were quick ink paintings describing the faces of the newly dead to preserve their features for posterity. These various marks on surfaces represent our meditations on death and our urges to life.

In the history of Western painting, from the 1400s onwards, ink on paper was traditionally used to make preparatory sketches.

Here the artist would make ink serve like a shorthand, producing gatherings of indexical6 marks to describe visual forms. Ink was premixed as a liquid and was quickly and easily accessible, unlike oil paint for example. Laid paper7 was becoming more widely available and mostly replaced the kind of surface used for drawings prior to this, from which the drawing would be erased after use. Preliminary drawings were referred to in Renaissance Italy as a “primo pensiero” (first thought) or as a “schizzo” (quick). Unlike finished paintings or mosaics, these 5 Until Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1839, erotic art consisted of engravings, drawings, and ink paintings. Photography was first adopted by artists as an aid to study nudes. However the realism of the photographed nude as opposed to artists’ paintings of the nude intrinsically made the photograph erotic. Soon after 1839, photography, including erotic photography, became more accessible to the public, not just for artists and the wealthy upper classes of French society.

6 Indexical is the phenomenon of using a sign, image, or symbol which represents meaning without having to be specific to what is being communicated.

7 Laid paper is paper that has a ribbed like texture impressed in the paper.

This impression is made during the manufacturing process of the paper. Laid paper is often preferred by artists who work in charcoal or pastels, as the rough paper holds the pigment well.

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drawings were not meant to last. The act of drawing allowed the artist to store information made by observation and to create a memory for the artist to draw on later: they were studies and rehearsals. In addition, preliminary drawings were made so that problems could be worked through at this stage of the process. Lines could be made and remade, iterations continued in layers until the artist had figured the solution or the accuracy of the observation. Broad tonal washes would create volume and ambience without constructing detail. The artist could use colour in their inks but for the most part, these drawings were monochromatic, pared back visual notations. The artist could probe, look closer, experiment, and engage in a process in which they could think through drawing—find through drawing.

Since the invention of photography changed the trajectory of painting—liberating it from its function of describing and recording visual reality, and enabling abstraction and gestural expressiveness to develop—there has been a particular latitude of thought around the nature of paint and the act of creation with it.

Mass media images and the digital image economy have caused a counter-resurgence of interest in the aura of the handmade and the unique object. The function of the ink drawing or preparatory sketch is no longer necessarily viewed as something in the service of a final work, but the very qualities that made it generally unacceptable as a finished artwork in its own right are the same qualities for which it is valued in its own right now: mark-making, ephemerality, and painterly vitality.

Three contemporary artists whose works embody these qualities are Elizabeth Peyton,8 Raymond Pettibon,9 and Marlene 8 Elizabeth Peyton (1965 - ) is an American painter best known for her small opaque portraits of celebrities, public figures, and politicians. Her work has been exhibited in numerous museums such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and the Whitney Museum of American Art [both in New York City, New York], as well as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. Peyton currently lives and works in Long Island, New York.

9 Raymond Pettibon (1957 - ) is an American painter mainly working in Indian Ink, acrylic, coloured pencils, and watercolour paints. He is most famous for his big wave surfer paintings. Pettibon has exhibited in a number of major museums around the world. He currently lives and works in Venice Beach, California.

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Dumas.10 Peyton and Pettibon are active artists who were rising stars in the 1990s in America, a time and place that crops up in Steele’s work. The gay erotic film industry was at a peak in the 1990s and many of Steele’s subjects starred in these movies and died during this time, some from the HIV/AIDS epidemic which was at its height in 1995 in America.

Many of Peyton’s subjects from this time were celebrities whose images she had garnered from magazines and newspapers.

Her slick, thin, figurative paint was unusual and evoked the two-dimensionality of celebrity and paparazzi pictures from magazines. These paintings also held a shimmering, insubstantial and fragile iridescence like the soap bubbles of “Homo bulla est” paintings, part of the genre of vanitas11 paintings of 17th century Holland which were meditations on the ephemerality of beauty and the inevitability of death.

At the same time, Pettibon was developing his painterly aesthetic through immediate graphic marks and handwritten threads of text. A recurring, haunting image of Pettibon’s is the lone counter-culture Californian surfer in whom he saw the ego of the artist or the star rising high up the curve of the wave, facing their own loneliness and mortality, dangerously close to crashing.

Mortality and sex are pervasive in Dumas’ work and her painterly brilliance is in her facture,12 her handling of the medium. One aspect of her oeuvre is grids of inky portraits and one of these in particular is Rejects (1994 to present, ongoing). This is a conceptually interesting approach to an ongoing project, where 10 Marlene Dumas (1953 - ) is a South African artist based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She paints primarily in oil, and ink. Dumas’s figurative work deals with difficult themes and confronts violence, displacement, racism, and investigates erotism in complex ways. Dumas’s practice involves using found imagery that talks to her personal life as well as broader socio-political currents in contemporary society.

11 The term vanitas is a Latin term meaning empty. 19th Century Low Countries paintings typically depict still lifes with symbolic visual metaphors that emphasis the artists obsession with the “emptiness of life” and the futility of pleasure. Vanitas paintings have thematics that overlap with themes of memento mori.

12 Facture is referred to as the quality and execution of an artist’s painting, for example the brushstrokes, and the materiality of how a work functions.

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this collection of portraits consists of paintings that she rejects from other groups of portraits of marginalized subjects and that for one reason or the other, never belonged: a marginality of marginality.

This context of art history—and contemporary artists like these—informs Steele’s making of the body of work “Each man kills the thing he loves…”. The men that he has chosen to paint were stars, but they were not mainstream film stars, they were erotic stars, a profession which drags with it the weight of moralistic censure. Further, they were stars of gay erotic films, a genre which carries with it extra prejudice in the form of homophobia. This marginalisation through prejudice would have impacted almost every aspect of these mens’ lives, particularly dangerously a lack of medical attention (including awareness of sexual safety and sexual health policies in the industry) and mental health resources.

Drawn from photos and screenshots, they should have the feel of being distant, but instead I feel compelled. They are strangers to me, but I see that they have their names written onto the painting and so now I know their names. I named them silently in my head, then I named them out loud and realised how they function as memento mori.13 I am interested in the fact that Steele has chosen to paint only their faces, not their bodies, not even their chests, and that their names are written as the largest text in the composition in a script which feels both sensual and violent, and that the placement of this text which in any other context would read as the caption or title feels more like it suggests the severing of the head from the body. There is additional writing, which is smaller and which draws me in. This text describes the age at which the men died, the date of their deaths and the manner of their passing.

With many of the deaths detailed here resulting from complications from HIV/AIDS, and from suicide, it’s clear that marginalisation and prejudice are killers and that these mens’ lives were haunted by this.

13 Memento mori is a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die”.

Memento mori symbols remind viewers of the inevitability of death. This motif is often represented in artworks and jewellery as a skull, wilting flowers, extinguished candles, and clocks.

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Some portraits are painted straightforwardly, the ink is measured and the handsomeness of the faces is bland and overt. The artist has decided in these examples to describe at face value the commodified head shot, but also punctures the veneer by revealing the trauma of the subject’s death through the text. In other portraits, Steele reveals so much in the faces of the men.

I find myself looking closer, searching for inky marks that are soft around the mouth and eyes, describing a hesitation or a sudden small tell of fear or uncertainty. These marks are tied together, tied to the line of the lips or lid which is a fine, exquisite assured line painted over the cloudiness beneath. Steele uses ink brilliantly, he holds back from over-description so that each nuance of expression can shift away from any reading that I want to ascribe; the closer I look, the more I lose my own certainty of thinking that I can know these fugitive faces and I see that in careful consideration of the viewer, Steele has facilitated a way of approaching and seeing these portraits that mirrors his own process of curiosity and seeking.

By using ink as a medium for painting and drawing it becomes clear that it not only has a quality of being able to pin down and to annotate visual “fact” but also possesses the ability to have the opposite quality where there are thin washes that reveal little detail and these two differing factures produce a visual tension.

Sometimes using ink into wet paper allows the ink to follow its own trajectory and here exists another tension between the artist’s control and the artist’s relinquishing of control. All of these techniques can produce differing qualities of mark or stain which we interpret in differing ways. Looking at Steele’s portraits I see shifts of expression and ambiguity, moments of distortion.

Some marks look violent, wounding—like scars or bruises.

He told me that many of these men were asked by film producers to present themselves in different ways, change their appearances and effect so that they better suited certain kinds of consumer. This perhaps mirrored struggles of identity outside of the professional field too and Steele suggests this in

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the liquidity of the ink and its evocation of slippery identity.14 In the context of the early deaths of so many of these men, this liquidity also suggests a sense of forming and transforming as if describing the continual act of change or growth and it is here, and where some marks feel as gentle as a caress, that Steele reveals through his intelligence and pathos a sense of their lives cut short, as unfinished as preparatory drawings.

14 In post-apartheid South Africa, many curators have identified the struggles of the representation of identity. Identity politics has become a dominant thematic in visual art in South Africa.

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Philip Steele, Memento Mori, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Adonis Cheeks, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Al Parker, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Alan Lambert, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Alexander Gustavo, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Alfonso Ribeiro, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Andy Mantegna, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on 380 g/m2 triple primed acid free 100% fine weave cotton canvas, 71.1 x 55.9 x 3.5 cm (27.99 x 22.01 x 1.3 in.)

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Philip Steele, Ángel Veliz, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Artist, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Bill Henson, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Billy Herrington, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Billy London, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Bob Blount, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 48

Philip Steele, Brian Hawks, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Calvin Williams, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Cameron Fox, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Cane Carrington, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Casey Donovan, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Casey Jordan, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Chad Douglas, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Chip Tanner, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Chris Burke, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 57

Philip Steele, Christopher Lance, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Clint Lockner, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Cody Foster, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Damon Audigier, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dani Rivera, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dave Slick, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dawg Dixon, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Denis Reed, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dick Fisk, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dimitri Kane, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on 280 g/m2 triple gesso primed acid free 100% cotton canvas, 59 x 41.8 x 1.5 cm (23.23 x 16.46 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Donny Price, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Dustin Michaels, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Ed Dinakos, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 70

Philip Steele, Erik Houston, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Erik Rhodes, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on 350 g/m2 highly pigmented Titanium Dioxide gesso primed acid free 100% cotton canvas, 61 x 45.7 x 2 cm (24.02 x 17.99 x 0.79 in.)

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Philip Steele, Evan James, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Flex-Deon Blake, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Flex-Deon Blake II, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 75

Philip Steele, Ghetto Nerd, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Hole Hunter, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Jack Wrangler, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Jay Dymel, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Jeff York, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Jessy Bernardo, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Joe Simmons, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Joey Stefano, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Johnny Rahm, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Johnny Rahm II, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour and pencil on Canson Montval fine grain cold pressed 300 g/m2 acid free paper, 49.8 x 39.9 cm (19.61 x 15.71 in.)

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Philip Steele, Joshua Berlin, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kash Satal, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, King B, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kip Noll, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kirby Scott, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kurt Marshall, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kyle Dean, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kyle McKenna, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Kyle McKenna II, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour and pencil on Canson Montval fine grain cold pressed 300 g/m2 acid free paper, 49.8 x 39.9 cm (19.61 x 15.71 in.)

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Philip Steele, Lance, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Lee Ryder, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Leo Cooper, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Leo Ford, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Lindon Hawk, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Mack Daddy, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Mack Daddy II, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 101

Philip Steele, Marc Radcliff, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Canson Montval fine grain cold pressed 300 g/m2 acid free paper, 49.8 x 39.9 cm (19.61 x 15.71 in.)

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Philip Steele, Mark West, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Max Schulter, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 104

Philip Steele, Mike Henson, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Nelson Troy, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Noah Storm, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Péter Kozma, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Pierre Buisson, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Ridder Rivera, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Roman Heart, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Ryan Fields, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Ryan Morrison, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Scott O’Hara, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Scotty Knox, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Scotty O’Hara II, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 116

Philip Steele, Sean, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Seduction, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Sergio Canali, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Scotty Sewperman, 2021, Ink print with unique hand applied Acrylic Ink on 180 g/m2 coated matt paper, 36 x 26 cm (14.2 x 10.2 in.), Edition of 50 120

Philip Steele, Shane Risk, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Terry DeCarlo, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Philip Steele, Xander Scott, 2021, Indian Ink, watercolour, and pencil on Arches watercolour hot pressed 300 g/m2 100% cotton paper, 60 x 45 cm (23.62 x 17.72 in.)

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Philip Steele, Zac Stevens, 2021, Acrylic, Acrylic Ink, and pencil on Belle Arti 326 g/m2, primed, fine/smooth weave, unbleached, Italian poly/cotton canvas, stretched over a red fir wooden stretcher, 60 x 45 x 1.5 cm (23.62 x 17.72 x 0.59 in.)

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Mark Coetzee (South Africa, 1964 - ) is Founding Executive Director and Founding Chief Curator, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa where he worked from 2013 to 2018. Founder and Director, Gay Contemporary Art Institute (2018 - ); Co-founder and Editor in Chief of Postmeridian Independent Art Publishing (2018 - ); and Contributing Editor, Art Al Dia, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Miami, USA (2007 - ). Coetzee continues to advise major contemporary art collections globally, and mentor young curators who have gone on to prestigeous institutions such as Claire Breukel, Curator, Dacra, Miami, Florida; Jose Diaz, Chief Curator, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Owen Martin, Director and Founding Chief Curator, Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa; and Juan Valadez, Director, Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida, etc.

Past positions include: Visiting Professor, New World School of the Arts, University of Florida, Miami, USA (2009 - 2019); Chair, Art in Public Places Programme at the V&A Waterfront, Cape Town, South Africa (2013 - 2018); Founding Director, Curatorial Training Programme, Cape Town, South Africa (2013 - 2018); Curator, Zeitz Collection, Switzerland, (2009 - 2018); Cultural Specialist, Zeitz Foundation, Kenya (2009 - 2018); Cultural Specialist, The Long Run, UK (2009 - 2018); Advisor, PPR Home, Paris, France (2010 - 2013); International Advisory Council, and Adjunct Curator, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, USA (2013 - 2017); Program Director, PUMAVision and Chief Curator, PUMA.Creative, Herzogenaurach, Germany (2009 - 2013); Selection Committee, PPR Foundation for Women’s Dignity and Rights, Paris, France (2011 - 2012); Director of both the Contemporary Arts Foundation and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA, (2000 - 2009); Adjunct Curator, Palm Springs Art Museum, USA (2008 - 2009); Adjunct Faculty Member, New World School of the Arts; Co-founder and Co-Director, New World School of the Arts Honours Program; Founding Director, Curatorial Training Program, Miami, USA (2001 - 2009); and Founder and Director, Mark Coetzee Fine Art Cabinet, Cape Town, South Africa (1996 - 2000).

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Coetzee is an award winning artist recognised in his own right, award winning peace activist and environmentalist, art historian, and award winning writer and publisher. Coetzee has published extensively on art, writing for journals including Arte Al Dia, Huffington Post, Mail & Guardian, Revue Noire and Sunday Independent. He has authored over 30 monograph catalogues on various artists. His latest publications include monographs on Hernan Bas, Keith Haring, Eberhard Havekost, Philip Steele, and John Stezaker. Coetzee studied at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France.

Owen Martin (Canada, 1985 - ) is the Director and Founding Chief Curator of the Norval Foundation, Cape Town, South Africa (2018 - ). At the Norval Foundation he has curated major exhibitions by Michael Armitage, Wim Botha, Lisa Reihana, and Ibrahim Mahama, as well as co-curated, among others, exhibitions by William Kentridge, Zanele Muholi and Yinka Shonibare. Accompanying Kentridge’s exhibition, he edited a corresponding 360 page catalogue raisonné of Kentridge’s sculptural practice that is distributed internationally by Koenig.

Martin serves as a Trustee of the Gerard Sekoto Foundation.

From 2015 to 2017 he was the Chief Registrar, and the Curator of the Centre for the Moving Image at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa. Prior to that, he worked with the British Council, London, UK; Zeitz Collection, Switzerland; PUMA. Creative, Herzogenaurach, Germany; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; the Contemporary Art Foundation, Miami, USA; and the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, USA. Martin holds a Master of Arts in Art History from McGill University, Montreal, Canada, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a double major in Art History and Painting, from the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, USA. 126

Tanya Poole (Canada, 1971 - ) is an artist living and working in France.

She is known for her large-scale ink paintings and her exploration of this medium. Conceptually, her fields of interest include Ecology, Feminism, and New Materialism. She currently exhibits in Germany, the UK, and South Africa.

From 2011 to 2016 Poole lectured in the Fine Art Department of Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, and was awarded The Vice-Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer Award. She left her post as a Senior Lecturer to return to full time studio practice. Before this, in 2004, Poole co-won The Brett Kebble Art Award with Phillip Rikhotso and the following year was awarded the Eastern Cape Premier’s Art Award.

Poole’s recent solo exhibitions include: “Undergrowth” at Everard Read, London, UK, in 2021; “Ancient Codes” in 2019 at Everard Read, Cape Town, South Africa; “The Whispering Spring” in 2018/19 at Galerie m, Bochum, Germany; “The Island” in 2017 at Everard Read, Cape Town; and “Thozama and Rose” in 2015 at Galerie m.

Her solo exhibition “The Audience” was selected for the Cape Town Art Fair’s “Tomorrows/Today: The Top 10 Emerging Artists from the African Continent”, curated by Tumelo Mosaka. In 2010 she exhibited on “Juncture: New Paintings from South Africa”, with solos by Nigel Mullins, and Luan Nel at artSPACE, Berlin, Germany.

Poole also curates and mentors, including projects such as the 2016 curation of the “Emerging Painters” exhibition, Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa and in 2008 “Hollywood, Nollywood, Bollywood”, World Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Poole holds a Masters in Fine Art from Rhodes University (1999), where she also received her Bachelors in Fine Art in 1995.

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Philip Steele (1996 - ) was born in Zagreb, Croatia of an Irish father and a Croatian mother. He has been a permanent resident of South Africa for most of his life. He was raised in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal.

His studio practice is currently in Cape Town, South Africa.

Steele graduated with a BA in Fine Art at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town in 2019.

Steele is a professional practicing artist and has had solo exhibitions at Association for Visual Arts Gallery, Cape Town; and Michaelis Gallery, University of Cape Town. His third solo exhibition takes place in October 2021 at Nel Gallery, Cape Town. He has participated in seventeen group exhibitions at venues such as: Apartment, Cape Town; Association for Visual Arts Gallery, Cape Town; Cape Town Art Fair; LagosPhoto20, Nigeria; Nel Gallery, Cape Town; Panal 361 Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Pretoria Art Museum, Tshwane; KwaZulu Natal Society of Arts, Durban; and Smith Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa.

His work is in public and private collections globally. Numerous group and solo publications have featured his work. A fourth monograph on his work will be launched in October 2021. He has participated in residencies internationally, and travelled extensively doing research for his practice.

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I cannot thank my gallerist Luan Nel, and his partner Neil Pendock, enough for giving me this fantastic opportunity to have a solo show at Nel—a gallery with LGBTQI+ interests at heart.

Luan, your trust, encouragement, time, and energy means so much to me. Thank you for believing in me.

Owen Martin, I am honoured by your essay and insight into my work. A Museum Director and Chief Curator of your institutional stature focusing on a young artist starting his career is truly humbling. I cannot thank you enough for your time and many studio visits.

To have such a respected and accomplished artist as Tanya Poole, write on my work is an unbelievable privilege. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and priceless wisdom with me, your studio, and your work in progress. Thank you to your husband Nigel Mullins and daughter Sophie Mullins-Poole for your essay collaboration, from the titles to the pronouns. Tanya, thank you for inspiring me to be a better artist.

To my collectors, it has been an honour and a privilege to have my work, and pieces from this exhibition, go to private collections that I respect so much—collectors like you that value the power of art and what it can do. Thank you for your endless support, unquestionable loyalty, and trust in my work.

To Lauren Smit, from Dog Ear Editions, thank you for your help in making this catalogue come to fruition. Your expertise and professionalism bring scans to life.

Thank you to Russell Jones, from Scan Shop, for your quality printing and help in making this catalogue tangible.

Thank you to Noël Allies, at N.C. Novel Bind, for your family’s exquisite binding skills.

Thank you to my family and friends. Especially my mother, Sanda Steele, you are always there for me in everyway. I am so grateful for your love and support.

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart my darling fiancé Mark Coetzee. Your interview is insightful, and demonstrates a rare knowledge of the interdisciplinary. Your knowledge of art history, theory and philopsophy of art is unlike anyone I have ever met. On a personal level, you make me a better man, and a better human being. You have consistently and unquestionably been there for me and inspired me in my ups and encouraged me through my downs. Your expertise, advice, knowledge, patience (a whole lots of patience, might I add), and wisdom is priceless to me. I love you endlessly.

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