Giorgio Celin: Do You Remember? — Feeling, Queerness, Exile

“Do You Remember? — Feeling, Queerness, Exile”is a continuation of Celin’s trajectory of reading the queer through the figure of the migrant. Celin transmutes into painting the phenomenological reality of being queer, using the archetype of the migrant as a variant of queerness, layering and exposing the mixture of feelings within one’s national and cultural identity, as well as familial and romantic relationships.

 

The title is a slight nod to the act of falling in love and the breaking up of a relationship.  On the other hand, it captures the feeling of loss felt by people that leave their native countries, either voluntarily or by force. This loss is often romanticized in the hearts and minds of exiles and immigrants, creating a nostalgic fantasy about the place they left. It is this feeling that Celin gracefully hones in on his paintings either overtly through images of lovers and friends or through the smallest details that fill in the stories of these paintings. The process of remembering is intertwined with Celin’s process, as he draws from his own experiences as a gay immigrant to create this body of work.

Celin’s paintings depict languid, fluid, and beautiful people, who can’t help but seem distant and longing. These subjects share space, their bodies, and sensations of postcolonial restlessness. They seek to belong, finding each other in the dance clubs, and bedrooms that populate cities. As curator and writer, Paul Clinton, puts it, “unstable attachments [relationships] might be the core of Celin’s project [exhibition], offering a model of belonging that is neither essentialising nor conforms to the universalising call for queers to be citizens of nowhere, a position the sexile [sex-exiles] can hardly afford.”