Philip Gladstone: A Mural of the Mind Page Two

Almost always vested in the image of a nude young man, Gladstone's subject in any given piece may take the form of a teenager whose head is always turned sharply rightward, eyes downcast, chastened; or of a youth sitting alone at the top of a banistered landing; or of a figure curled behind a door, lying on its side, possibly unconscious. Interiors are often Hopper-empty. Wide floor planks and molded doorways stand behind clapboard exteriors, New England's relentless melancholy a constant ether pervading these personalities' spaces.

There are boys here who want to communicate and are dramatically thwarted, from the naked twenty-something who tries to place a call in a roadside phone booth to the one pressing his ear to a wall by his bed and the other one distraught beside a vase of flowers, a page of paper and an instrument that might be a knife and might be a letter opener.

Others have every opportunity to communicate and don't. The "navigators," as Gladstone names them, are young men whose toy ships don't bring them together as friends in the lagoon in which they stand. The naked young man behind many doors in many paintings remains invisible to the dozing fatherly figure in the armchair. The boy seated in a dinghy across from a glowering Buddha-like black man (The Homecoming, 2007) is terrified, not led to reaching out.

Seen as sexual by many viewers, the Gladstone canon is certainly accessible as an ongoing discussion in sensual self-discovery, identity debate and longing. But little here is pornographic, in that the characters' intents, like the artist's, are almost never titillation. Intellectual arousal seems harder for these male seekers to come by than the physical and they're likelier to be paralyzed than liberated by their solitude.

Political moments sometimes enter a canvas through images of bright televisions in dark rooms carrying presidential speeches, watched by lone, naked men.

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