Print archive: Venereal Sacraments
First published in The Art Paper Issue 00 — republished online on the occasion of Owen Connors’ exhibition your cart and plow over the bones of the dead at Robert Heald, through 19 November 2022.
Owen Connors, posthumous, 2021, egg tempera on board, 40 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Parasite
Owen Connors’ studio, Tāmaki Makaurau, January 2021. Photo: by Adam Bryce
It took me a good ten minutes to realise the carton of eggs sitting on a table in Owen Connors Karangahape Road studio were there for artistic, rather than culinary, use. Embarrassing really, as someone schooled in art history, it should have been obvious amongst the bottles of powdered pigment and the strange, brightly-coloured erotic scenes emerging before me on wooden panels hanging on the wall. On one, a heterosexual couple passionately embrace, apparently oblivious to the numerous leeches sucking at their flesh. Another shows a penis ejaculating fire over some pretty daisies blooming from the ground below; whilst the third panel depicts the washing of a pair of hands in a sink as a rubber duck floats by.
This is Connors’ first presentation at the Auckland Art Fair with Parasite and second foray into the painting medium known as egg tempera: a powdered pigment bound with egg yolk to form semi-opaque and quick-drying paint applied in short, sharp brushstrokes to a wooden panel (the only surface that won’t make the eggy paint crack). It is rare to come across a contemporary artist dabbling in egg tempera. An ancient form of painting, with earliest examples found on early Egyptian sarcophagi, egg tempera is best known for its ubiquity during the early Italian Renaissance. You may recall the static religious iconography of fourteenth-century Tuscan painter Duccio, particularly his passive Virgin Marys with skin turned green due to the tempera having aged, surrounded by stacked saints and angels with gold leaf halos jostling for prime positions around their Madonna. Well before the austerity of the reformation of the Catholic church, egg tempera has, at least in my mind, become tethered to this period of almost-camp veneration.
Tempera is known to be a slow and detail-oriented process, thanks to the precise build-up of layers that preclude improvisation or last-minute changes. For Connors, however, there is no sense of suffering over the medium. Tempera represents a natural progression from their recent quilt-making practice, a craft that demands a similar discipline, patience, and skill. In the 1980s particularly, friends, families and lovers came together en masse to create quilted panels for loved ones lost to the AIDS pandemic, finding something restorative in the process. Connors has been continuing this tradition and pushing it towards a queer future where that same devotion persists, but where a pervasive sense of morbidity and loss has languished. In their 2019 exhibition SISSYMANCY! (play_station, Wellington, 2019), Connors lovingly embroidered, collaged and painted the enlarged fruits of an Exquisite Corpse game played with their friends and collaborators. Quilts can be punishing projects, demanding total devotion from their makers, yet the resulting presentation by Connors was ebullient, bold and complex, a triumph for craft and queer art-making in Aotearoa.
In Connors’ new egg tempera paintings, another thread of queer history is being tugged at. Magical realists (and at times, players in a complicated love triangle with each other) Jared French, George Tooker and Paul Cadmus painted in egg tempera throughout the 1940s and 50s. Their paintings were characterised by highly choreographed depictions of figures resembling classical Greek statues situated in contemporary quotidian scenes with rigid architectural elements, cryptic symbols, and sense of restrained sexuality and desire confined within strictly organised compositions. Connors shares this interest in veiled symbolism, mysticism and contemporary displacement. Their first presentation of tempera works, For Future Breeders at Parasite (Tāmaki Makaurau, 2020), showed perturbing domestic and familial scenes alluding to the fourth-century Gnostic text On the Origin of the World, a converging of two different times and spaces to render a newer, queerer, vision of reproduction.
Through the slow process of egg tempera, Connors folds time to hold communion with Tooker and the magical realists, creating artworks with a campy holiness that probe at the history of the medium and engender a new mythology of figures living in a shared, queered reality. The leeches, the handwashing and fiery cum speak of danger, disease, and death; whilst the sunny, pastel colours (one
even underpainted with a fluorescent yellow) and cheerier details, such as children splashing in the background of the couple’s embrace or the dinky rubber duck, enhance the playfulness and banality of the scenes, complicating any attempt at pathologising the subjects. Simultaneously, the audience becomes voyeur. We see sly reference to the sexual act of fisting (one may gently coax their hands into a ‘beak’ for insertion) through tongue-in-cheek placement of the figures. Even to recall the way egg tempera is made, by puncturing the membrane of a yoke as it is dangled over a receptacle, is to imagine penetration and coalescence. As such, the paintings do make inferences to HIV and other sexually-transmitted infections, but the unique quality of light afforded to them by the medium and technique makes the subjects seem almost holy. These erotic and playfully enigmatic paintings conjure up a divine future of unencumbered queer love and desire, and Connors, using a material that is very long-lasting (eggs themselves are symbols of fertility and virility), enshrines their permanence.
Photography throughout: Adam Bryce
Owen Connors, A True Story, 2020, egg tempera on board, 39.4 x 30.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Parasite
Owen Connors, Temperance, 2020, egg tempera on board, 60 x 40 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Parasite
This article appears in The Art Paper Issue 00. Purchase to read more.
(limited edition brochure)
Issue 00 celebrates artists who live or exhibit within Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa (New Zealand). Produced in conjunction with the Auckland Art Fair 2021, published by Index.
Featured artists: Conor Clarke, Owen Connors, Millie Dow, Ayesha Green, Priscilla Rose Howe, Robert Jahnke, Claudia Jowitt, Robyn Kahukiwa, Yona Lee, Zina Swanson, Kalisolaite ‘Uhila.
Contributors: Dan Arps, Julia Craig, Erin Griffey, Susan te Kahurangi King, Shamima Lone, Victoria McAdam, Robyn Maree Pickens, Meg Porteous, Lachlan Taylor, George Watson, Victoria Wynne-Jones.
Specs: 56 pages, 23 x 26 cm (folded vertically)
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Julia Craig on Owen Connors’ egg tempera paintings.