Galerie Peter Kilchmann is happy to current “Private Results”, a solo exhibition of latest work by New York– primarily based artist Travis Boyer (b. 1979, Fort Price, Texas, US) and his first solo exhibition in Switzerland. Executed with dyes on silk velvet, Boyer’s works discover how surfaces accrue which means, inviting reflection on decoration, cultural reminiscence, and queer embodiment.
Wealthy in texture and layered with historic references, the works in “Private Results” remodel the ornamental into the political and the sentimental into the crucial. By way of a fusion of self-styling, camp, and materials sophistication, Boyer articulates a painterly language that embraces extra, ambiguity, and seduction.
Velvet is each medium and metaphor in Boyer’s work. As a substrate, it carries a singular materials historical past: as soon as a cloth of aristocratic luxurious, later a marker of bourgeois domesticity and, by the Seventies, a cloth of countercultural kitsch. In Boyer’s fingers, this advanced lineage is neither rejected nor idealized. He paints with a class of dyes generally known as protein dyes, used for animal substrates comparable to silk, wool, and hair, exploiting the fabric’s capability for optical depth. Portray on each the reverse and entrance sides of the material, he permits pigments to bleed via or be pressed in. For this furry floor, he makes use of instruments from magnificence tradition—steamers, atomizers, and industrial hairdryers—to sculpt and manipulate shifting planes of shade and texture.
These work refuse to be flattened, actually or metaphorically. Because the velvet’s pile refracts gentle, the photographs emerge and recede, shimmer and dissolve. There is no such thing as a single perspective; the viewer should transfer, look intently, and interact with all visible perceptions. In an age dominated by slick digital pictures and scrollable content material, Boyer’s work calls for embodied trying. His surfaces usually are not passive grounds however performative, unstable, and assertive.
The motifs that populate Private Results are drawn from an archive of decoration: false eyelashes, thigh-high boots, jewellery, rhinestone belts, feathers, and fragments of costumes. They’re objects that signify id, aspiration, and transformation. Some works perform as nonetheless lifes: Inexperienced Carnation Pink Dragonfruit evokes Oscar Wilde’s coded floral hanky code of queerness, whereas Brooches Click on Clack presents a constellation of baubles that appear to jostle and whisper amongst themselves. Others, comparable to Born to Do This, and Boots Continuum, depict adorned torsos in states of changing into. These figures usually are not portraits, however embodied concepts – costumed, faceless, and filled with presence.
In Michael the Acrobat, the velvet itself seems to be again: faint printed masks patterns beneath the dye recall the layered gazes of Commedia figures. As viewers try to repair the picture, their place shifts; the work resists seize. It’s this instability that turns into an area of freedom. Because the artist notes, his figures usually are not made to be checked out passively or consumed as spectacle. They invite the viewer to take part, to conspire, to acknowledge themselves. In Lover Junior, a pair of rose-colored trousers suggests a determine caught mid-transformation, neither totally current nor absent, however hovering within the liminal house of changing into. The softness of the hue contrasts with the sharp tailoring of the garment, indicating a stress between vulnerability and poise.
Different works discover relationships and ritual via atmospheric metaphor. Third Retains Taut, with its trio of burning candles, alludes to intimacy and triangulation, whereas Suggestion Diabolique hints at seduction and spectacle via its play of sunshine and shadow. Really feel the Evening is Product of Rocks presents paired crystals as emblems of mirrored longing, echoing the doubled dynamics of queer kinship. In these items, objects serve not as props however as witnesses, accumulating reminiscence, storing need, and animating the silent performances of each day survival.
Author Elyssa Goodman describes Boyer’s technique as one among “self-seduction,” a follow of convincing oneself to consider in the opportunity of expression via supplies which can be unruly, feminized, and traditionally devalued. Like his grandmother Virginia Odette Canada, who the artist remembers ritualistically dying her eyelashes whereas watching Oprah, Boyer approaches magnificence as each labor and play. Adornment turns into a know-how of the self, a type of armor and celebration.
A central reference in Private Results, as famous by artwork historian Susanna Cole, is the determine of Pierrot, the tragicomic clown of the Commedia dell’Arte. From Watteau’s Gilles to Picasso’s blue-period acrobats, Pierrot has served as a clean slate onto which artists challenge melancholia, marginality, and modernist dislocation. Boyer, nonetheless, queers the determine via what theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls disidentification: a course of by which minoritarian topics reclaim dominant codes and recode them towards liberation. In Boyer’s reimagination, Pierrot shouldn’t be the butt of the joke however the heart of the stage – assured, adorned, and conspiratorial.
Whereas Boyer is grounded in up to date queer tradition, his work attracts equally from artwork historic references, notably the Rococo. Like Fragonard and Boucher, he collapses distinctions between portray and the ornamental arts. Works like Bow Bind and Nuit d’Amor echo the sensuous, pastel-toned indulgence of Rococo interiors, however they achieve this with a realizing wink. There’s a deliberate exaggeration, an embrace of what Susan Sontag referred to as the “democratic spirit of camp.”
But Boyer shouldn’t be concerned with irony for its personal sake. Somewhat, his work reclaims floor from the Modernist suspicion that deemed decoration as extra and kitsch as cultural failure. He operates in a lineage that features Joyce Pensato, Ulrike Müller, and K8 Hardy – artists who’ve queered the legacy of Summary Expressionism via humor, bodily reference, and feminist rage. The place Clement Greenberg demanded flatness and disinterest, Boyer provides pile, sparkle, and intimacy.
As critic Thomas Love observes, Boyer’s velvet work subvert the binary of floor and depth. They display that surfaces, particularly these which can be tactile, adorned, and performative, can carry profound which means. Boyer’s work could seem ornamental, however their calls for are conceptual. They suggest an expanded area of portray that features the politics of trying, the histories of gendered labor, and the poetics of transformation.
All through the exhibition, Boyer constructs a constellation of works that navigate between nonetheless life and staged efficiency. As in all of his work, these usually are not simply representations, however rehearsals of doable selves. On this method, “Private Results” turns into greater than an exhibition however somewhat a stage. Boyer’s velvet panels don’t merely depict; they carry out. They shimmer with accrued which means, drawing on private reminiscence and shared cultural codes. Boyer’s work celebrates the facility of self-fashioning as each survival and resistance, and creates advanced, glamorous narratives about seduction.
at Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
till July 25, 2025
