The Subterranean Allure of Ryan Huggins’s Bathhouse Paintings

A column of frosted glass has been installed in the center of a. SQUIRE in London. The device transforms the gallery into a different kind of space, a more intimate one that brings you up close to the works. The gallery becomes an extension of the rooms depicted in the surrounding frieze of paintings, which are full of concealment and display, exhibition and restraint. Ryan Huggins’s “Pluto” takes as its subject matter the eponymous bathhouse in Essen, regularly visited by the Dusseldorf-based artist, captured in sixteen oils on canvas.

Huggins’s wrap-around installation of paintings is divided into four sets of four canvases, each ‘phase’ mapped to a different part of Pluto’s sprawling architecture. The viewer is thus plunged into the subterranean atmosphere of the paintings, and the rituals of the bathhouse that have long been a staple of gay male culture. “Pluto” offers a kind of total immersion—fallen out of time, with no beginning or end —mirroring the saunaplex’s lack of natural light. The darkness provides a fragile and alluring ambience.

On entering the gallery, the left-hand series of paintings (all 2024) depict naked and solitary figures navigating Pluto’s initial floors. A lone man stands on a kind of balcony or dais, his shadowy flesh contrasted against two ivory-bright murals of classical male nudes. Another male figure attends to his locker, body frozen mid-movement like a dancer.

In the paintings that correspond to Pluto’s bar area, we see men—alone or in couples or trios—chatting and exchanging glances. You get a sense of roles being assumed in a place where fantasies are both interchangeable and easily thwarted. The brief intrusion of language, in signs bearing the sauna’s name or the slogan ‘Young Stars XXL’, appears all the more incongruous amid a sexual choreography that seems largely wordless.

In the main shower room, we see three figures depicted posing under the water like ancient Greek statues. In the adjoining painting, the tentative atmosphere of the dry sauna yields to the closer combination of bodies. Yet there’s something dispassionate about these scenes too. For all its hothouse avidity, the overarching communal model here seems to be about how to be together, alone. Indeed, the world of Huggins’s “Pluto” brought to mind a phrase from the great gay writer Edmund White: “a life devoted to pleasure is a melancholy one.”

In this show, ecstatic abandon is tempered by asceticism. A private cabin appears cell-like in its rigid geometry—a series of frames within frames. In another cabin, a man is fucked while watched hungrily by two onlookers; next door, within the same painting, a lone man lies spreadeagled on a cot, a pornographic movie of a man being penetrated playing on the screen above him. It is a moment of both solitude and expectation: fantasy taking its cue from familiar scripts. These scenes suggest the inherent theatricality of cruising, with its well-rehearsed gestures and codes of behavior, its drama of pursuit and withdrawal.

Huggins’s palette of blues is spectral, wintry. They shift from spangled and powdery to cloudy and muted. (Is there a queer lineage of blueness? Think Marie Laurencin’s turbid washes of turquoise; Derek Jarman’s 1993 meditation on death and desire). This coolness is casually interrupted by the pink tips of cocks, or by buttocks glowing pale like moths in the dark. Visiting “Pluto,” the viewer becomes part of this communion, another lonely hunter. During the private view, bodies jostled in the tight space, exchanging flickering glances, as if according to bathhouse ritual. Voices leaked from the street outside. Walking back out into the daylight, it felt like a dream dissolving, its secret intact.

“Ryan Huggins: Pluto” is on view at a. SQUIRE, London, through July 13, 2024. 

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