• Platform Gallery

In each of three of Steve Locke's paintings at Platform Gallery this month, two men are alone in a room.

That's a funny thing to say, because since they're together, they're not alone, and since we're looking at them—and they are painted with this self-consciousness, as if they're aware that they're being watched, maybe by each other, maybe by some outside force—they're really not alone at all.

Instead, the paintings are about all the very charged, different ways that two men can share a space, negotiating various levels of their own comfort with their connection-by-proximity. In the painting peers, they're posed next to each other at a urinal wall, one man peeking over at the other man's parts, that second man's gaze trained straight downward, pun intended. In cleanse, the two men (different men) are in a studio apartment. One is wearing what looks like his work clothes with the overshirt unbuttoned and has his hands plunged in the sink, his back toward the other man, who stands in the background, naked and aroused. The aroused man looks lost in thought, like he's forgotten what he came here for. The dishwashing man, his lips pursed, eyes the side of the room where the other man stands. He seems to disapprove of something, or have a secret from the other man.

More (NSFW)...

In t-shirt (above), the seated man who's either buttoning or unbuttoning his shirt appears to be intentionally, ever so slightly averting his gaze away from the man in front of him, who is sexily removing his T-shirt. This moment of dressing/undressing is full of tension, but is it necessarily sexual tension? Locke amps it up by collapsing the actual distance between the two men in the room—one, we can tell by the scale, is standing at a distance in front of the other, but on the horizontal axis, the two men's bodies nearly connect, the seated man's elbow almost appearing to touch the standing man's midsection, which is about to be revealed when his shirt comes off. It's a great little moment.

Boston-based Locke is gay, but insists these paintings are broader looks at masculine interaction. Women are "supposed" to be looked at, but what about men? , He says:

The exchange of looks, the privilege of looking and the wish to be seen are positions I explore to reveal the ways men respond, desire, and relate to each other…. A lot of people look at [my] paintings and think that they’re about being gay or about being queer and I try to remind them that they’re about being male, and that’s a different sort of thing. I’m not opposed to being queer, I hope to be really good at it one day, but I think the notion that two men can be together in a situation or they can be touching and they might not be gay, they might just be two men—I think that that happens. I don’t think that’s a gay thing, that’s just a male thing.

The show, which includes several other artists as well, is up through December 17.

• Platform Gallery
• Steve Locke, cleanse, oil on beveled MDF panel, 24 inches square, 2006

• Platform Gallery
• Steve Locke, peers, oil on beveled MDF panel, 22 by 28 inches square, 2006