exhibition
Opening February 14: Robert Lucy, PARADISE

About the exhibition

Robert Lucy
PARADISE
February 14  - March 29, 2026

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 14, 4 - 6pm
Artist's Talk: Saturday, March 14, 4pm

An installation of new and recent colored pencil portraits by Woodstock, NY-based artist Robert Lucy. A brochure with an essay by Dr. Margaret Denton accompanies the exhibition.

PARADISE
Paradise is a group of seventeen colored pencil "portraits" by Robert Lucy based upon photographs of young men from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The sitters are anonymous, at least to us, seemingly selected for their attractiveness and the masculine types they represent: gentleman, athlete, explorer, soldier, sailor. The images, for the most part, adhere to the conventions and expectations in place at the time. Sitters dressed for their studio portraits; men often wore suits, formal wear, or military uniforms. They were required to hold their poses for several moments to avoid blurring, which often resulted in a stillness bordering on rigidity. Most often they looked directly at the camera and rarely smiled. The slight smiles, relaxed poses, and informal clothing of a few of the sitters in Lucy's depictions only became common in the early 20th century with the advent of the Kodak and amateur photography. A true likeness was the aim of the photographer as well as the expectation of the sitters. Social identity might be gleaned from the sitters' clothes, painted backgrounds, and accessories provided by the studio, but the inner lives of those who posed remained, for the most part, opaque.

The most extraordinary aspect of the photographic portrait and the source of its poignancy is the fact that it is "an emanation of the referent," as Roland Barthes so eloquently put it. The camera registers the light coming from the body in front of it confirming the person's existence. The emanations that Lucy imagines and makes visible come from the inner lives of the sitters. Their energy, intensity, and desires are manifested in a variety of lush and stunning landscapes that merge with their bodies: mountain lakes, vibrant streams, topiaries, soft rolling hills, calm shorelines. Some landscapes are strikingly dramatic with arctic icebergs, exploding fires, desert moonscapes, and skimming space ships. The men are adorned and bejeweled with headdresses of natural forms: mushrooms, flowers, an octopus, an anemone. In one drawing, aptly titled Camouflage, a large and magnificent moth serves as a mask worn by a very beautiful young man. The language of metamorphosis is particularly striking in Mushroom Man where a cluster of trees reads as the man's beard, and in Tattoo where a masted sailing ship dangles from the sitter's ear. Through metamorphosis, surprising juxtapositions of unrelated elements, and fantastical clusters of natural and imagined forms, the artist convincingly renders the surrealist merging of dream, reality, and desire.

Lucy, astonishingly, creates these luxuriant and exuberant images with colored paper and the quiet medium of colored pencils. He exploits the ability of the pencils to create a fine mesh of markings that can be both descriptive and evocative. In Mushroom Man, horizontal strokes of orange and blue in the water reflect the sky that illuminates the sitter's head, while at the same time suggesting the woven fabric of his suit. In Whisper, swirls and commas of color, mostly bright greens punctuated by purple, capture the movement and murmur of a flowing river, sounds that are echoed in the great blue heron whispering in the man's ear. In Garden, one of two drawings in the group that pictures an unclothed man, an elaborate lotus form decorates his torso, its stem curving slightly over his abdomen as it rises into full bloom across his shoulders, neck, and mouth. This intricate body art has the surprising effect of distilling the man's pose and gaze into an act of meditation. The intensity of his state  is enhanced by the deep pink paper and palette that are tempered by a pale blue sky. 

The colored papers are integral to evoking the sitters' inner lives as the artist and we imagine them. While the deep blue paper in Night Light is descriptive of the sailor's uniform, the arctic water behind him, and the icebergs on the horizon, it also seemingly speaks to the young man's stoicism in the face of extreme conditions. In Flame, the warm brown paper together with the deep blacks that cover it heightens the drama of the fiery landscape that burns in and around an elegantly dressed man in formal attire. That tonal palette clashes with his bright white shirt and tie and with his reserved demeanor, an attitude that is challenged by the presence of a luminous sea anemone bursting upon his head.

All but one of the drawings depicts a single figure. The exception is Sentinel, an image of two seated men. Unlike the other portraits in the series, the format of Sentinel is horizontal, which contributes to the informality of the portrait as do the poses of the men. A young man with light brown hair wraps his right arm around his companion's shoulder and grasps his right hand. The companion relaxes into the young man's body, further confirming their attachment. Near their joined hands are clustered three pomegranates, one with its seeds exposed. This is a fruit rich in symbolic meanings: love, passion, a hidden life revealed. A glorious yellow paper frames the couple whereas delicate yellow leaves sprouting from thin branches both decorate and softly screen them. Perched on one of the branches a vigilant hawk protects their intimacy.

There is an ambiguity of time in these portraits. Due to photography's ability to arrest time the men pictured are tethered to a specific past, but also exist distinctly in the present before us. We can imagine several of the young men wearing high collared shirts inhabiting the world Hanya Yanagihara brings into existence in the first part of her novel To Paradise. There she imagines a society in America in the 1890s in which same-sex marriages are not only accepted but deemed normal. However, as her title suggests, while paradise is sought after it is elusive. In his Paradise drawings Robert Lucy imagines and makes visible the harmony between the public faces of the sitters and their private lives, between their desirability and their desires. They manifest hope for a society in which the love of men for men is not only normal but radiant.

- Margaret Denton, Ph.D., is Associate Professor Emerita, University of Richmond. Her articles have been published in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Art History, History of Photography and The Getty Journal.