Studio Prokopiou - Wet Paint

26. You blinked, and a galaxy spun to life.

(on the left) 41. Do not long to keep it. Do not try to teach it to others. It expires.

(on the right) 42. To shape the world in trurh is quite different from holding it in your hands like a trembling bird.

The photographs depict figures that are naked, painted, posed as statues or as characters from myths. They are often surrounded by objects: crowns of flowers, plaster hands, mirrors, fabrics. These are theatrical images—intense and layered with meaning. The colors—red, blue, gold, and black—work symbolically, suggesting life, blood, spirituality, and death. The inspiration of antiquity and of earlier painting traditions is evident, yet refracted through the queer sensibility of contemporary artists.

                                            Ours is the age of power.

Alongside the images appear texts that expand their meaning. A particularly interesting context is provided by Hugh Nianias’s essay. In Polychromy, the author shows that ancient sculptures were not white and “pure,” as we often imagine them, but vividly colored, painted, embodied. This is a crucial point, because Wet Paint restores precisely such a body: sensual, colorful, impermanent. The photographed figures recall antique statues, yet their skin is once again covered with paint, once again alive and multicolored. It is a gesture of resistance to the classicist ideal of “purity” and a return to the original richness of form.

Daniel Orrells’s essay, Greek Love in the Nineteenth Century: Ideal and Real, Text and Image, broadens the interpretive perspective even further. The author shows how, in the nineteenth century, fascination with “Greek love” was closely tied to attempts at reconciling ideal with reality. Greek love—often understood as homoerotic bond—became for writers and artists both a source of inspiration and a subject of moral controversy. Wet Paint can be read as a contemporary response to those tensions. Here, Greek love is neither hidden nor idealized—it is embodied, open, daring. The photographs demonstrate that eros, friendship, and the body can serve as foundations for both art and communal life.

 THE RUIN

All relics of barbarism will be extinguished, not only from here but from the whole of Greece, while the relics of the glorious past will be covered in a new splendour, as that firm basis on which the present and the future will be established.

Taken as a whole, the book tells a story of transformation: of how the body can be at once fragile and divine, mortal and eternal. The figures in the photographs resemble statues, yet at the same time they are full of emotion and imperfection. The props—plaster hands, crowns, flowers—evoke motifs of death and rebirth. The short texts accompanying the images add reflections on memory, pain, and the passage of time.

Wet Paint can thus be read on several levels. It is an exceptional photography album, but also a meditation on what the body is and how, through art, we can come to terms with impermanence. It is a book about love—both carnal and spiritual—and about its capacity to act as a creative force. Finally, it is a contemporary reinterpretation of Greek tradition, restoring its queer, sensual, and multicolored dimension.

Text by Gosia Paczka

The book is available at the IFF Reading Room and through the bookstore’s catalog:

A collector’s photograph from Wet Paint will also be featured in the upcoming December exhibition at IFF. More details coming soon.