Quinn Vermeersch
*ANA*
‘A Queer lovestory’
Lockdown has been hard for everyone, even harder for some. This challenge has been going on for a year, and increases inequalities on a big level. This inequality has a lot of dimensions, and one of the dimensions recently discussed is mental health. However, these discussions are in some way always dismissed from the actual discussion. Economic inequality, the lack of green accessible urban spaces, the lack of workspace, the lack of the voices of so many marginalised people. Besides that, there also has been a polarised discussion about who is useful, essential to society. Needless to say, artists don’t make the cut.
Why art when we can have Xanax? Why go to a doctor or psychologists -and take the place of someone who might need care more than you- when you can have an extra beer or cig (It’s much cheaper anyway)?
It’s these thoughts that makeup ‘*ANA*, A Queer Love Story’. It’s the first painting of this format made by Quinn in over a year, made on a canvas found in the basement of their apartment, left there by the previous owner, who told them they made it whilst having a difficult phase. And thence the journey begins, the paintings are covered first with à Keith Harring-like image, and then slowly, layer by layer worked to be finally one of those classic illustrations used in glamorous travel campaigns of rail and air. The Atlantic Ocean, with the artist, their boyfriend and Poï, their friend’s dog, running towards liberty.
The process is messy, The ‘Cassandra Effect’ flowing through the veins of the artist. The canvas, damaged from the beginning, but hence the relevance of it in a queer portraying.
Unlike the mantra of Cis, Heterosexual, or Perfect love stories, ours are starting with most of us already being damaged. Trauma, healing and community give us the power to restore, to integrate this into a narrative. But it’s not an easy one. This love, these journeys we undertake, the conflicts that arise, they won’t be able to be fixed by some (marriage/relationship) counselling, as Western narratives often like to portray. Some wounds are too deep, some battles so though, some constraints. Unlike the Good Person/Bad Person stereotype often found in heterosexual, and upper-middle-class LGBTQI* representations of love, sometimes we just get stuck. We’re addicted. We have financial problems. We are suffocating in a world tending more and more to socio-economic apartheid.
Hence the paradox of the painting, whilst it looks peaceful, it’s partly broken, and even the artist doesn’t know how many moons the image will last.
There’s hair, there are spats of beer and coffee, there are some mistakes considering the visual.
But in the end, it’s real.
‘*ANA*, A Queer Lovestory’
Oil on Canvas
100,00 x 120,00 cm