James Bartolacci: Life Without Night

About

The exhibition draws from Bartolacci’s personal experience of
queer nightlife in New York City prior to the pandemic, as well as
current and ongoing scenes staged in friends’ bedrooms, which
evoke the ambience, intimacy and intensity of New York’s queer
nightclubs. Filling the gallery with new oil paintings and pastel
drawings, Life Without Night asserts how such venues and
spaces provide meaningful parameters for solidarity, social
affinity and self-affirmation.

Believing nightlife is an art form in itself, Bartolacci honours the
production of an evening out with each work. Dance scenes
featuring hedonistic figures as they move under a cloak of neon
lighting are produced by digitally collaging photographs and
videos to encapsulate a variety of moments from a single night.
Recreated in oil painting, each work captures a specific place
and date; in Spectrum Closing Party, Bartolacci transports us to
the night that Brooklyn queer nightclub Spectrum finally closed
its doors. A pillar of alternative queer nightlife in New York City,
Spectrum offered both salvation and escapism to its residents.
Here, Bartolacci places the same emphasis on the relationship
between clubbing and belonging, with figures embraced by their
luminescent nocturnal surroundings.

In more abstracted scenes Bartolacci has somewhat erased the
figure, highlighting the voids also found in club gatherings.
Whilst we catch subtle glimpses of a bodily presence, Bartolacci
instead focuses our attention on the club interior, the colour
saturated lighting and pulsating atmosphere. In doing so, he
evokes the myriad of emotions found within these spaces: joy,
ecstasy, comfort, release, intoxication, desire, arousal, but also
rejection, sadness, and loneliness.

Finally, a series of paintings staged in friends’ bedrooms is a
continuation of work featured in Bartolacci’s recent online
exhibition with Taymour Grahne Projects. In response to the
closure of club venues during the pandemic, Bartolacci uses the
bedroom as an ersatz setting to stage intimate and evocative
scenes with friends. Exploring the significance of self-styling,
these scenes are constructed collaboratively with the sitter;
friends are requested to choose an outfit, lighting conditions and
pose, meanwhile discussing the personal value and importance
of the city’s nightlife. Offering an expanded insight into each
person through their bedroom ephemera, the works gesture to
the labour and devotion involved in creating a nocturnal look.

James Bartolacci (b. 1988) received his MFA in Painting and
Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2020 and has since
exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at Galerie Perrotin and
Taymour Grahne Projects. Bartolacci was born in Easton, PA and
currently lives and works in Queens, New York City.