Watch glasps and stolen glances.

in Sculpture of the 20th Century by Aaron Krach

When I was young my friend and I would draw ‘Dilys’. These were basically round blobs with a smile, arms, and legs. They lived in an underground world, full of ball pits, swimming pools, slides, and bounce rooms. They were all men, there were no females they just kind of appeared from the ether. Looking back this might have been a sign I would grow up to be gay. I mean I was basically drawing a spa for a society of all-male hedonists.  

I continued to draw all through childhood and when I reached high school art was my favourite subject. The burly head of art with his stocky build my favourite and most formative teacher, in hindsight the art teacher was the first (straight) bear I encountered, basically a prototype of the men I have dated since.  I remember his thick hairy forearms leaning on the table teaching me perspective and showing me how to shade, as clearly as I remember him introducing me to Warhol and Rothko.

At 16 I knew I had to make it to art school and I have been in love with two things ever since. Art and Men. I’m now a curator and art historian and I’m lucky enough to make my living from the art world: although high school is long past my two obsessions remain the same, and it’s their interaction that is at the heart of Aarons Krach’s work.

It’s very on trend to be queer, to queer the cannon, to queer theory, to discuss our oppression and visibility and community. But I have never been interested in any of that, my academic research is not on gay artists, or queer love, its about copyright law, I know how strait-laced!  I have never felt a sense of community, or that my sexuality dictates how I should think, dress or act. For me, as a young, confused lad a teacher or a rugby player coming out would have helped me feel a sense of belonging far more than the multitude of negative stereotypes, and restrictive ways of ‘being queer’ I see paraded every June.  In fact, for every corporate advert or exhibition ‘celebrating love and making queer-ness visible’ there is a little boy like me who for years felt more confused because if that’s being gay, then maybe I’m not. For me gay is untethered from fashion and trends, its far more basic, more primal, more animal, I love men.

But although I’m a misanthrope there are things that do join me to other gay men. Things that make me feel like maybe we do all have something in common.  It’s the small details, the things un-said, the sights relished. The strange things that catch your eye, why does this turn me on? Why do I want to look at that? why am I the only one who finds this funny?

A sense of not being alone comes from a beautiful realisation that you are not the only one, others, other men, share these afflictions, humour, and obsessions. There are other men like you. 

This is how I feel when I encounter Aaron Krach’s work. He gets me. He sees the way I see. He notices the things I notice. He loves the things I love.

Aaron’s work is not about a gayness that is proud and public, but hidden and secretive. A gayness made of verbs: Glances and whispers and stolen looks. It’s a secret language which only a few speak. The beautiful thing Aaron does is intertwine this so lovingly with that other secret language, that other area of life that is about close looking and consideration and pure joy and obsession with the visual, the fine arts.  He understands that for a few of us the way we look at art and men is indistinguishable. He is in love with the act of looking and seeing and the lines between art/male, sculpture/body,  love/lust  are blurred.  He is indiscriminate in his appreciation of visual pleasure.

The crease at the bottom of a foot as you sit on the ground. The gap between the denim of a pair of stiff blue Levi’s jeans. The line of dark curly hair on a stomach.  The ripples of the rib cage as a man turns to run. The glistening of a calf extended in metal through space. A dark pupil within the trench of a heavy brow. The deep metallic fault line between the body and background of a relief. The way a bronze patinas into a deep green and the way stubble greys first at the chin. The wiry scaffolding of a modernist sculpture and the way veins appear glistening after exercise. The way two bulbous forms can form a love handle and how the moustache hair grazes the point where the lips melt into cheek.

Aaron knows that modernist sculpture is useless, lost and at sea when not balanced against and in direct dialogue with the human form. He understands that after two world wars representations of the male body became fractured and fraught, the incomparable destruction caused by machines on the body disrupted representational sculpture and both human and artistic bodies became abstracted and broken, rough and mechanical, torn and worn and unrecognisable.  But by choosing modernist sculpture, by focusing on the interaction between these fractured forms and the gay male body, a body itself which has a history of castration, experimentation and removal Aaron draws a fine balance between violence and sexuality, lust and control, the secretive and the public, art and life, and in doing so returns post war sculpture to its erotic lineage.

In Aarons work the attention and focus of looking and appreciation usually celebrated in works of art and denigrated in the male form are made equitable. He gives the same focus to the way a man’s arm hair, rests over the discoloured metal of his grandfather’s Rolex, inherited and passed down, like the thickness of the wrist it sits on as Brancusi did to a bird in space.  Aaron understands the way the skin is indented around the watches clasp and how the arm hair sits over the metal band is more powerful and erotic then either the arm or watch alone, just as Brancusi understood that sculpting the negative space was as critical as the positive space.  Aaron’s work makes visible the nod, a hint, a long glance, it makes clear the way a single undone shirt collar button can ignite an reaction in us. Aarons work is the way we look at art, it is the way we see men.  To quote O’hara, Aaron’s work is ‘the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary’