Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Pina Bausch’s seminal 1975 dance theatre interpretation of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. I had seen this piece performed before, danced by her company, Tanztheater Wuppertal, but last night’s performance was performed by a group of 36 dancers from 14 African countries. This work, performed by an all-Black cast, had a new and different energy. As an audience member, and a person of color, I thought that many of the movements in the work—which I previously perceived as tied to modernism—suddenly seemed to spring from something ancestral, as though the graceful rounding of arms, the energetic leaps and dives, were not something invented but something inherited. On one hand you could say the choreography, in its formal sense was inherited from Pina Bausch herself. But more profoundly, you saw these dancers express how modernism sprung from an age of colonialism, borrowing, if you will, from another people, something profound, historic, ancient, remembered in the body, hard to trace or even point to.

The experience of this performance provided a useful lens through which to look at two gallery exhibitions I have recently enjoyed. The first was Louis Fratino, “In bed and abroad” at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Fratino, who has made a splash in the art world the past few years, continues to present paintings often depicting male intimacy. In particular, the works feature figures of brown bodies—or at least bodies without a presumption or default to whiteness. In Red nude (After Mafai), a male lies face down on a rippling red sofa or mattress, his head nestled in his arms. Some flowers, a throw, a tiny shirt, and shoes complete the scene. In Washing in the sink, a swarthy male nude stands at a long double sink, both faucets running, as he washes himself. He is bathed in a rich golden light. The beautiful summer portrays a figure on his back, floating in a tiny body of water. Another male, on the bank, in the shade, has his eyes cast down. The painting is a rich composition of dark mossy greens, with moments of a warm rusty hue on the face of the swimmer, and a collection of personal effects in blue in the lower left corner. Not all the paintings are male nudes. There are other subjects in the show: strolls through the park, a landscape, a painting of flowers, a dancer on stage, children at a table. These are all classic subjects of painting in the twentieth century which the artist is clearly thinking about. Much like in the Pina Bausch performance, they look different and feel different to me when the figures are of color.

Aside from portraying queer intimacy, and aside from casting his painting with characters with brown skin, Fratino chooses to show a different kind of body than we might see in similar paintings by earlier modern artists. His bodies are thicker, meatier, curvier. The skewed, and, at times, almost fish-eye lens perspective in his paintings result in bulbous feet and full bread-like hands. When we see the eyes of his subjects, they are generalized to large, dark, so-called “Spanish” eyes. By making this choice, the artist is reinvigorating rather common subject matter by inviting new possibilities of identification in the work. This is most interestingly seen in the pale gray monochromatic painting, Piazza Affari—a depiction of the sculpture Fuoco by Leone Lodi, found on the front of Palazzo Mezzanotte in Milan. The tall, lean, but muscled figure in the 1920s era sculpture is transformed by Fratino—not dramatically, but enough to subvert Lodi’s ideal and to provide, a softer, more real, and perhaps even more American, or non-white American, notion of physique.

A few blocks away at the gallery Kurimanzutto, there was an exhibition of work by Mexican painter Roberto Gil de Montes titled “Reverence in Blue.” Half the show consisted of paintings from this year, and other half were somewhat older. There are similarities between the work here and those in the Fratino exhibition. Both artists are dealing with queerness and depicting brown bodies. Both artists have a specific style in which they depict the human form. In the case of Gil de Montes, the bodies take on a flatter quality—almost paper cut-outs elegantly placed in the composition—like elements in a still life. He uses a stylized representation of eyes, but they are not like those in Fratino’s paintings. They are elongated from side to side; their whites are prominent. Feet are also generalized—as if they are caricatures.

Where the voluptuous and warped perspective of the Fratino paintings felt dreamy, the surreal simplified color fields and painted backdrop style of the environments of Gil de Montes’s painting felt like a dream. In Farewell three shirtless men, in swim trunks stand before an image of a lagoon. The men are similar enough that they could be the same man but also different enough that they could be three different men. One faces away, one faces the viewer, one is in profile. They are all roughly the same size with similar features, but all have different trunks. They are formal and frozen, the water and trees and sky are glassy green, cerulean, and lilac. Spots of yellow and orange nearly twinkle in the background. In another painting, Boy Deer, a man lays on his side in what appears to be the surf. He is fully dressed; a deer head crowns his own. Both the face of the man and the deer seem generic in a way, but the specificity of the moment implies something very personal. The man’s large brown hand rests on his hip and his stare is challenging, although he seems to not react to this strange mise-en scene. The horizon line appears to vanish on the left side of the painting.

Gil de Montes’s painting Ash Wednesday was a particular favorite. This very straight forward painting is a portrait. Against a faded olive background, the subject wears a pale ice blue robe-like garment. His eyes are in the signature style of Gil de Montes and his glance is turned slightly away from the viewer. He is handsome; he has a mustache that looks drawn on, and he has bed head hair and a strikingly tidy and deliberate cross on his forehead. The subject of the painting is a compadre of the artist, but not having known that, I read something else into it. The cross of ashes on the forehead may already seem surreal to non-Catholics, but I see something even deeper. The robe and the messy hair imply to me that this is someone who has received their ashes while convalescing. HIV-AIDS is something that the artist has confronted in his work. Given the date of the painting, 1999, I wonder—almost fear—that this may be the subject’s last time receiving the sacrament of ashes. This confluence of Catholicism and queerness is especially poignant to me.

I feel that it is important to state here that the work of these two artists is so much more than what their paintings represent. Both of these men are making paintings that are thoughtful, technical, and beautiful. The work is simply a joy to look at. An artist’s work is most powerful when somehow it not only compels a viewer with its beauty but connects to the world around the viewer and grows in strength and meaning in the process. I cannot say that either of these artists intended to spur the experience I had with their work, especially as it collided with the dance performance, but I am grateful to have had it. These artists challenged me and my thoughts and my self-perception—how I see my own brown queer body.