“Richard Hawkins: Potentialities,” Kunsthalle Wien, 2025

Annette, I just stepped off a plane from a trip to Cali. The jacarandas, glowing their particular light purple, flush in sunlight, taking on gray glare in haze, spangled the LA hills. In the colder clime of San Francisco in a friend’s studio garden, a black iris, breaking free of its protective spathe, was just about to burst open, jet velveteen. Returning to Houston, the thick of the humidity – 80 degrees at 7 pm – made me want to barf. As did the Supremes’ decision earlier today to gut voting rights, many calling it the worst decision since Jim Crow. An abomination. Recollection of jacaranda, no matter how dazzling, couldn’t brighten my mood.

Ah, Richard Vincent Price Hawkins, who now often paints in the vivid flower-garden hues of Pierre Bonnard. “Each man kills the thing he loves.” So wrote Oscar Wilde, soon after his release from “hard labour,” in “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” (“Hard” doesn’t really cover how brutal his time in jail was.) Jeanne Moreau sings a cruelly light-hearted version of those words in Querelle, I believe to music by Peer Raben, the levity somehow making the lyrics more sinister. Jean Genet’s novel – even if the betrayals and cortèges of Pompes funèbres often prove more apposite – and the kaleidoscopic virulence and swoony absinthe-hallucinations of navvies on the docks in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s last film (RIP Brad Davis) could be seen to set up certain modes and moods, syncopated and détourned (gaytourned?) by Hee Haw, Tatsumi Hijikata, and Antonin Artaud, and, among monstrous other things, the history of modernist French painting. When the loved one leaves, sometimes you do want to kill him, or at least throttle him. But there’s a lot of haunted house horror movie shenanigans, too. Spooking someone by suddenly yelling “boo!” The body is a haunted house; the aging body, with its memories, perhaps the most haunted. Thus the Vincent Price as well as the Hee Hawkins of it all. Richard allows spirits from the beyond (Gustave Moreau, Francis Bacon, Forrest Bess) to get rambunctious in his studio, and the results can be as hilarious as they are goth. Moreau’s hypnotic The Apparition – ricocheted through gay porn, dripping digital come and Mike Kelleyesque ectoplasm – isn’t a bad place to begin. Neither is À rebours or the loucher parts of Le temps retrouvé, the last volume of Marcel Proust’s Recherche, where, in the blacked-out night of WWI Paris, Charlus visits his former lover Jupien’s male brothel to be whipped by thugs as well as by milkmen and others pretending to be thugs. (I’d DJ Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood into the mood mix, as well as Emily Dickinson’s crucial note that “Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted” [but these would be my additions, not particularly Richard’s].) The artifice is as important as the Frenchness: Cher oncle Charles didn’t call one of his books Les Paradis artificiels for nuthin’. The play-acting, however actual the blood from the whip’s snap or the beatings’ empurpling bruises, courses in the carmines and green-tinted violets suppurating so richly (so Richardly). Trick and treat.

Richard Hawkins, “The Supermundane,” 2023

Because we are all burdened to live under the boot of patriarchy, the asymmetries of “gay” and “straight” porn remain. Many (most?) men of Richard’s and my generation saw gay sex in gay porn even before we had it (or knew the name for what we’d had), and its importance to coming to terms with gay sexuality was intensified by AIDS. Also, it’s nice to see that tedious twerp Timothée Chalamet rot from the inside – once for dating a Kardashian, once again for dissing ballet, and then once more for just being super annoying in his needy “pleasing” antics. These, of course, wouldn’t exactly be the same reasons Richard has for letting Timmy fester. xo

Bruce Hainley lives in Houston, Texas.

Image credit: Courtesy of Galerie Buchholz, photo Markus Wörgötter